These stories are beautifully linked—a character here pops up there, a road name is recognized—such that it almost feels like living in a neighborhood and watching days go by for all the faces you recognize on the corners. Howland displays a sociological lucidity when addressing her native city ... Throughout the Chicago stories Howland’s political insights rise to be part of the text ... stories display a frenetic emotional register that jumps from page to page, telling the stories of women left isolated but not left alone. The titular story spreads like a spill and focuses on death ... Howland’s primary concern throughout the collection is the quotidian, and its existence as the expression of material, systemic struggle and existential, metaphysical struggle ... Her characters are single mothers, noisy neighbors, students living on the cheap, heavily accented cousins, shopkeeps, beat cops—all described delicately with boundless feeling but full of holes ... Calm Sea is a wonderful book ... criminally, there is not much else widely available—Howland published three books in her lifetime and we can only wait to see if they will come into print again. Of course this is a criminal state of affairs—we’ve forgotten a genius.

The energy in her fiction comes...from a ferocious sense of engagement ... a stubborn avidity crowds out despair. Most often that avidity expresses itself in the language of precise observation ... No less vigorous are Howland’s descriptions of her hometown ... Urban tensions and the 'icy vengeful exterminating cold' of the long winters roil through these stories, but there are also moments of grace ... As the Chicago writer Isaac Rosenfeld once wrote, such humor 'loves the world from which it seeks to be delivered.' That’s as good a formulation as one can imagine for the literary sensibility of Bette Howland, whose sentences continue to beat with a stylish percussion and a glowing heart.

In Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, the collected stories of Bette Howland, we encounter a writer questioning the meaning of existence, playfully knocking over a sacred jar and watching the contents slowly spill across the counter ... Howland’s stories all interrogate living through varying degrees of explicitness: in the title story, overtly, in an interlocution with the dead, or, more subtly, in libraries, apartment buildings, movie theaters, and court rooms throughout the rest of the book ... It is in these disquieting moments of candor when Howland’s prose holds a magnifying glass up to a room we’ve all inhabited before and reveals something staggering and obvious that the privileged among us may have chosen not to look at ... Howland’s insights into the shifting gender dynamics that would reshape, or at least disrupt, the patriarchy, are just one facet of the revolutionary nature of her work. Why then, did it disappear from the discourse? When we consider legacy—whose work is canonized, taught in universities, anthologized, widely accessed—it’s perhaps more important that we recognize whose work is absent. All too often women. All too often members of marginalized communities, of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender binary, or class status, whose art must fight for recognition, whether due to categorization or due to the dominance and presumed default of the white heterosexual male ... On the level of language, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage is filled with sentences of such astonishing poignancy that Howland’s prose feels as exacting as it does resonant ... The hole that was left by Howland’s absence was glaring. A gushing wound on an empty shelf. Now that her work has returned, we know the difference. Perhaps we always did.

Reading [Howland] for the first time this past summer felt like receiving an unexpected note slipped under the door from someone I’d never heard of, but who totally got me — who knew what I wanted to hear about, and how and why I wanted to hear it, and who just told me, page after beautiful page ... Howland’s sense of humor illuminates every page, and even her sharpest barbs glint with wisdom and humanity ... Her lyrical passages approach not merely poetry, but something like the sacred, almost holy in their cadences ... At last Howland’s claim has been re-staked, hopefully with a degree more permanence this time, for the rightful (after)life that awaits her work is that she be recognized as a Chicago writer of near-universal delight.

...a crucial compendium of Howland’s work ... About half of Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage consists of Blue in Chicago, a series of gritty, funny, harrowing descriptions of urban existence ... The dazzling Public Facilities offers vivid representations of the city dwellers who spend time at a public library ... When Howland isn’t portraying the strangers around her, she’s portraying her own intimates—wonderfully strange people themselves ... Howland rarely engages with the horrors of Jewish history; her Chicago Jews are fairly comfortable in their environs. And yet one senses, in her boundless fascination with the unsettled and in-­between, a link to the difficulties her own group has faced ... The matter of belonging arises again and again in Howland’s writing, in every context imaginable, from the university hospital to the public library to the refugee camp to the mundane family outing. Throughout her work, Howland illuminates our seemingly limitless talent for rejecting each other, our proclivity for designing systems that absorb some of us, but never all. And yet, in noting outsiders in so many situations, she confers on them a kind of normalcy. They belong everywhere as well as nowhere.

Much like Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women ... this story collection reinstates a long-overlooked artist of live-wire incisiveness, shredding wit, and improbable beauty ... First published in the late 1970s and 1980s, Howland’s intrepidly autobiographical stories feel brand-new ... A compassionate, trenchant, and hilarious ethnographer of eccentricities and dysfunction, Howland now takes her place in Chicago’s literary pantheon...

This collection, which blends memoir, essays, and fiction, is intended to introduce Howland’s work to a new generation of readers, and it is an introduction well worth making. Her words and observations shine like buried treasure, each story a glinty, multifaceted gem that, despite the passage of time, has lost none of its luster or clarity ... This achingly beautiful book throbs with life, compassion, warmth, and humor; hums with an undercurrent of existential despair; and creeps into your soul like the slushy-gray-yellow light of a wintry Chicago morning.

This stellar posthumous collection of stories from Howland (1937–2017) brings together works that span her career. Largely autobiographical and incredibly self-aware, Howland’s stories conjure vivid portraits of her home city of Chicago ... Within these straightforward setups, Howland creates stark and strange works of genius, portraying the complexities of family relationships as beautifully as she portrays her narrators’ insecurities, judgments, and anxieties. Her descriptions are darkly funny and delightful ... This is a collection to savor, and Howland is an author to celebrate.