Blue in Chicago: And Other Stories

by Bette Howland

Blue in Chicago collects together the sharp, bittersweet stories of Bette Howland and restores to our libraries an extraordinarily gifted writer who was recognised as a major talent before all but disappearing from public view for decades, until nearly the end of her life.

Bette Howland was an outsider: an intellectual from a working-class neighbourhood in Chicago, a divorcée and single mother, to the disapproval of her family, an artist chipped away at by poverty and perfection. Each of these sides of her life plays a shaping role in her work. Mining her most precarious struggles for her art in each of these stories, she chronicles the fears and hopes of her generation.

Blue in Chicago: And Other Stories introduces UK listeners to a wry, brilliant observer and a writer of great empathy and sly, joyous humour.

Published in the US under the title Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage.

Contents:
- A Visit
- Blue in Chicago
- To the Country
- Twenty-Sixth and California
- Public Facilities
- Golden Age
- How We Got the Old Woman to Go
- Aronesti
- Power Failure
- German Lessons
- Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, Literature, Literary Fiction, American

316 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 7, 2019

About the author

Writer, critic, and MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient Bette Howland died last week at the age of 80. “No matter what her subject is, Mrs. Howland is always looking for the bone and marrow of Chicago,” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in a 1978 review of Blue in Chicago. “And always the prose with which she searches is arrhythmical, nervous, self-questioning, passionate. You can’t fall into step with her, because the moment you do she shifts her cadence and takes off for another part of town, another time, another thing about Chicago.” However, though much awarded and clearly brilliant, she has in recent years been more-or-less forgotten by the literary establishment. “What happened to a career that held such talent and promise?” A.N. Devers asked in a 2015 piece about Howland and her rediscovery by Brigid Hughes, Howland was nomadic and often lived in isolation. Why did she retreat from what she had earned for herself? What role has the literary community played in allowing her work to fall from memory? Her son Jacob thinks the MacArthur is part of the answer.” Indeed, she didn’t publish anything else after winning the award.