Bøker av Bette Howland

'Stunning power and beauty abound in this book.' - The New York Times'Howland recalls the short-story writer Lucia Berlin' - Harper's Magazine'Honest, acerbic, alert, and always dazzling.' - Amitava Kumar, author of Immigrant, MontanaThings to Come and Go showcases the incomparable talent of Bette Howland in three novellas of stunning power, beauty, and sustaining humour.'Birds of a Feather' is a daughter's story of her extended, first-generation family, the 'big, brassy yak-yakking Abarbanels'. Esti, a merciless, astute observer, recalls growing up amid (the confusions and difficulties of) their history, quarrels, judgements, and noisy love, and the sense of estrangement and inescapable bonds of blood.The clamour of the city, both its threat and its possibility, are just outside the door in 'The Old Wheeze', as a single mother in her twenties returns to her sunless apartment after a date at the ballet. Shifting between four viewpoints - the young woman, the older professor who took her out, her son, and her son's babysitter - the story masterfully captures the impossibility of liberating ourselves from the self.In 'The Life You Gave Me', a woman at the midpoint of life is called to her father's sickbed. A lament for all that is forever unsaid and unsayable, the story is 'an anguished meditation on growing up, growing old and being left behind, a complaint against time.' (The New York Times)First published in 1984, Things to Come and Go, Bette Howland's final book, is a collection of haunting urgency about arrivals and departures, and the private, insoluble dramas in the lives of three women. This edition features an introduction by Rumaan Alam, bestselling author of Leave the World Behind.

Bette Howland's illuminating and bracing account of life in a psych ward, which marked her powerful entrance onto the literary scene, now with an introduction by Yiyun Li, author of Where Reasons End.

An extraordinary portrait of a brilliant mind on the brink: A new edition of the 1974 memoir by the author of the acclaimed collection Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage. With an introduction by Yiyun Li. ¿For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin¿real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business; time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life could begin. At last it had dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.¿ From the author of the acclaimed collection Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage comes W-3, the account of a brilliant mind on the brink. In 1968, Bette Howland was thirty-one, a single mother of two young sons, struggling to support her family on the part-time salary of a librarian; and laboring day and night at her typewriter to be a writer. One afternoon, while staying at her friend Saul Bellow¿s apartment, she swallowed a bottle of pills. W-3 is both an extraordinary portrait of the community of Ward 3, the psychiatric wing of the Chicago hospital where she was admitted; and record of a defining moment in a writer¿s life. The book itself would be her salvation: she wrote herself out of the grave. First published in 1974, the memoir that launched Bette Howland¿s career is being reissued as part of A Public Space¿s ongoing revival of ¿one of the significant writers of her generation.¿ (Saul Bellow) With a new introduction by Yiyun Li.

The bittersweet, sharply observed stories in Blue in Chicago introduce British readers for the first time to Bette Howland, a forgotten great of twentieth-century American fiction, perfect for fans of Lucia Berlin, Lydia Davis and Alice Munroe.