W-3

Howland, Bette

£9.99

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.

Out of stock

Publish Date: 21/07/2022
ISBN: 9781529035957 Category: Tags: , ,

Description

Dazzlingly and daringly written Rachel Cooke, Observer

W-3 is a small psychiatric ward in a large university hospital, a world of pills and passes dispensed by an all-powerful staff, a world of veteran patients with grab-bags of tricks, a world of dishevelled, moment-to-moment existence on the edge of permanence.

Bette Howland was one of those patients. In 1968, 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 labouring 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 a vivid – and often surprisingly funny – portrait of the extraordinary community of Ward 3 and a record of a defining moment in a writer’s life. The book itself would be her salvation: she wrote herself out of the grave.

Originally published in 1974 and rediscovered forty years later, this is the first edition of W-3 to be published in the UK. With an original introduction by Yiyun Li, author of Where Reasons End.

W-3 is one hell of a debut‘ Lucy Scholes, Paris Review

Howland is finally getting the recognition that she deserves Sarah Hughes, iNews

Additional information

Weight 164 g
Dimensions 197 × 130 × 19 mm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Paperback

Pages

288

Language

English

Edition

New Edition

Dewey

616.890092 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K