A Booklist Best New Book A Vogue.com Best Book A Chicago Public Library Best of the Best Book of 2019 A Kirkus 2019 Best Fiction Chicago Tribune Notable Book of 2019 "Loving, lacerating sketches." ―Harper's Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage restores to the literary canon an extraordinarily gifted writer, who was recognized as a major talent before all but disappearing from public view for decades, until nearly the end of her life. Bette Howland herself was an outsider―an intellectual from a working-class neighborhood 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 facets plays a central role in her work. Mining her deepest emotions for her art, she chronicles the tension of her generation. Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage introduces a new generation of readers to a wry, brilliant observer and a writer of great empathy and sly, joyous humor.

Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage: The Selected Stories of Bette Howland

Literature & Fiction

Howland, Bette

United States

A Public Space Books

“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)

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

De Chirico's poems are as essential and as mysterious as his paintings. ―Jhumpa Lahiri Gathered from early twentieth-century Italian magazines, manuscripts, correspondence, television recordings, and ephemeral art volumes, Geometry of Shadows is the first comprehensive collection of Giorgio de Chirico’s Italian poems, with award-winning poet Stefania Heim’s English translations presented alongside the Italian originals. A multifaceted artist who lived in multiple languages, de Chirico was just becoming famous in France for the paintings that inspired surrealism when he returned to Italy in 1916 to enlist for the First World War. Quickly determined unfit for the front line, de Chirico was assigned to desk duty and began to write poems in his native language. Translating his iconic visual imagination into literary form, Geometry of Shadows is a gorgeous document celebrating the elasticity and innate potential of language, by an artist ever in pursuit of deeper understanding.

Geometry of Shadows

Arts & Photography

De Chirico, Giorgio

History & Criticism

The acclaimed collection that restored to the literary canon "a long-overlooked artist of live-wire incisiveness, shredding wit, and improbable beauty."\nCalm Sea and Prosperous Voyage restores to the literary canon an extraordinarily gifted writer, who was recognized as a major talent, with Guggenheim and MacArthur “genius” fellowships, before all but disappearing from public view for decades, until nearly the end of her life when her work was rediscovered.\nBette Howland herself was an outsider: an intellectual from a working-class neighborhood 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 facets plays a central role in her work. Mining her deepest emotions for her art, she chronicles the tensions of her generation―and her native city―with a flair for language in the tradition of Lucia Berlin, Kathleen Collins, and Grace Paley. Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage introduces a new generation of readers to a wry, brilliant observer and a writer of great empathy and sly, joyous humor. With an afterword by Honor Moore.

Literary

About the Author\nBette Howland (1937-2017) was born in Chicago. She published three books in her lifetime: W-3, and the story collections Blue in Chicago and Things to Come and Go. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984, after which she did not publish another book. A posthumous collection of her stories, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, is also available from A Public Space Books.\nRumaan Alam is the author of Rich and Pretty, That Kind of Mother, and Leave the World Behind. He lives in New York City.\nFrom the acclaimed author of Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage and the memoir W-3, a trio of novellas about three women’s bold exploration of the desire for belonging as it comes into conflict with the fulfillment of our individual selves. With an introduction by Rumaan Alam.\nOver the past several years, A Public Space has brought the work of Bette Howland back into print. First published in 1983, Things to Come and Go is her final book, and a showcase of her stunning talent—the razor-sharp observations, the elusive narrators, the language at once experimental and classical.\nNearly forty years later, it’s writing that “feel[s] revelatory and imperative to the work we might all be trying to make next” (Lynn Steger Strong).

Things to Come and Go

The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast: New and Selected Stories

A nun crashes her car; an unborn child sings to its mother; a troubled priest is in the market for a London apartment. In The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast, John L’Heureux explores head-on life’s biggest questions, and the moments―of joy, doubt, transcendence―that alter the course of life. Compiled as he neared the end of his life, and conceived as the legacy of a life’s work, The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast brims with elegance, humor, and compassion, welcoming both the ordinary and the rapturous. L’Heureux is a writer of astonishing vision―a master of storytelling and the sentence.

L'Heureux, John

For the first time available in English, two portraits of grief by Friederike Mayröcker, one of the significant European writers of our time. Friederike Mayröcker met Ernst Jandl in 1954, through the experimental Vienna Group of German writers and artists. It was an encounter that would alter the course of their lives. Jandl's death in 2000 ended a partnership of nearly half a century. As writers have for millennia, Mayröcker turned to her art to come to terms with the loss. Taking its cue from the André Breton's work of the same name, The Communicating Vessels is an intensely personal book of mourning, comprised of 140 entries spanning the course of a year and exploring everyday life in the immediate aftermath of Jandl's death. Rilke is said to have observed that poetry should begin as elegy but end as praise: taking this as a guiding principle, And I Shook Myself a Beloved reflects on a lifetime of shared books and art, impressions and conversations, memories and dreams. Masterfully translated by Alexander Booth, these two singular books of remembrance and farewell offer a stunning testament to a life of passionate reading, writing, and love.

The Communicating Vessels

Mayröcker, Friederike

A photographic journey behind the opaque storefronts of shuttered retail spaces, and their magical worlds of compositions and modern ruins. In Capital, Mark Hage reframes the story of gentrification, and in photographic portraits of shuttered retail spaces captures the hidden soul of the city. Exploring the accidental compositions that emerge in the built environment, he invites us to view an alternative to increasingly over-mediated spaces in photographs of what is abandoned, altered, left behind, gutted.

Capital

Hage, Mark

Photography & Video

John L'Heureux spent his long, prolific career exploring questions of morality and faith in stories that entertain, surprise, and sometimes disturb; and The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast compiles the enduring stories of a distinctive American writer.\nA sweeping posthumous collection wrestles with faith, irony, and the redemptive nature of love. 
―Kirkus\nA nun crashes her car; an unborn child sings to its mother; a troubled priest is in the market for a London apartment. In The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast, John L’Heureux explores head-on life’s biggest questions, and the moments―of joy, doubt, transcendence―that alter the course of life. Compiled as he neared the end of his life, and conceived as the legacy of a life’s work, The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast brims with elegance, humor, and compassion, welcoming both the ordinary and the rapturous. L’Heureux is a writer of astonishing vision―a master of storytelling and the sentence.

In nine exhilarating stories of queer love in contemporary Nigeria,&nbsp;God's Children Are Little Broken Things&nbsp;announces the arrival of a daring new voice in fiction. A man revisits the university campus where he lost his first love, aware now of what he couldn't understand then. A young musician rises to fame at the price of pieces of himself, and the man who loves him. Arinze Ifeakandu explores with tenderness and grace the fundamental question of the heart: can deep love and hope be sustained in spite of the dominant expectations of society, and great adversity.

God's Children Are Little Broken Things

Ifeakandu, Arinze

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Books by A Public Space Books

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the A Public Space Books publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage: The Selected Stories of Bette Howland

W-3

Geometry of Shadows

Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage: The Selected Stories of Bette Howland

Things to Come and Go

The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast: New and Selected Stories

The Communicating Vessels

Capital

The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast: New and Selected Stories

God's Children Are Little Broken Things