Things to Come and Go

Howland’s striking prose breathes life into the everyday, the domestic world sung with a lyrical note … reminiscent of Edna O’Brien, with shades too of Jea Rhys. – Sarah Gilmartin * Irish Times *
Beneath the bright patter and eye-catching descriptions, each story has sadness at its core … a flood of energetic storytelling. – Marion Winik * Washington Post *
A writer of unusual talent, power and intelligence … A vigorous, original voice, an incisive mind and an uncompromised lyrical vision … Stunning power and beauty abound in this book; it is a trove of lyric riches. – Johanna Kaplan * New York Times *
The three novellas that constitute Things to Come and Go feel, at moments, like thinly disguised autobiography. With her flexible stance toward reality, her eye for the amusing, curious minutiae of existence, and her tonal range … Howland recalls the short-story writer Lucia Berlin. – Abigail Deutsch * Harper’s Magazine *
There is being seen, and then there is seeing. There is no seeing like Bette Howland’s. On every page, catching the narrator’s every glance, are observations rich in detail and delight—honest, acerbic, alert, and always dazzling in their inventiveness and wry, hard-edged wisdom. – Amitava Kumar
One of the significant writers of her generation – Saul Bellow
There’s no more interesting tale of neglect and rediscovery than that of Bette Howland. – Lucy Scholes * Paris Review *
[Howland’s] rhythmic sentences and striving characters resonate as much today as they did when first written in the 1970s and early 80s … one of American literature’s rising stars. – Sarah Hughes * iNews *
Howland’s great theme is the shared ache of human existence, a commonality that sometimes unites us, but more often divides and isolates. She captures this paradoxical push-pull between the longing and the resistance to connect – Diane Cole * New York Jewish Week *

Bette Howland (1937-2017) was the author of three books: W-3, Blue in Chicago, and Things to Come and Go. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984, after which, though she continued writing, she would not publish another book. Near the end of her life, her stories found new readers when a portfolio of her work appeared in a special issue of A Public Space magazine exploring a generation of women writers, their lifetimes of work, and questions of anonymity and public attention in art.

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