From Powells.com
Our favorite books of the year.
Staff Pick
Lucia Berlin is the greatest short story writer you've never read. Her writing style is conversational and real, yet poetic at the same time. Her protagonists are mostly working-class women who are unlucky in life, and Berlin writes about them with great insight, compassion, and, occasionally, humor. What left me totally gobsmacked, though, was Ms. Berlin's way with language. I found myself rereading sentences just to try and figure out how she managed to so-nimbly dance with her words. Lucia Berlin's stories sit easily with the work of Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, and John Cheever. Recommended By Sandy M., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Stories from a lost American classic "in the same arena as Alice Munro" (Lydia Davis)
"In the field of short fiction, Lucia Berlin is one of America's best kept secrets. That's it. Flat out. No mitigating conditions." —Paul Metcalf
A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With her trademark blend of humor and melancholy, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday — uncovering moments of grace in the cafeterias and Laundromats of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Northern California upper classes, and from the perspective of a cleaning woman alone in a hotel dining room in Mexico City.
The women of Berlin's stories are lost, but they are also strong, clever, and extraordinarily real. They are hitchhikers, hard workers, bad Christians. With the wit of Lorrie Moore and the grit of Raymond Carver, they navigate a world of jockeys, doctors, and switchboard operators. They laugh, they mourn, they drink. Berlin, a highly influential writer despite having published little in her lifetime, conjures these women from California, Mexico, and beyond. Lovers of the short story will not want to miss this remarkable collection from a master of the form.
Review
“Lucia Berlin's electrifying posthumous collection A Manual for Cleaning Women is
a miracle of storytelling economy, showcasing this largely unheard-of
writer's genius for streetwise erudition and sudden, soul-baring
epiphanies.” Lisa Shea, Elle
Review
“The vivacity, humor, sorrow, pragmatism and sheer literary star power that fill the 43 stories collected in A Manual For Cleaning Women
hit with such immediacy and vigor that it seems unbelievable that
their author, Lucia Berlin, died in 2004, at the age of 68, before most
of us ever knew about her. How a writer with this much appeal slipped
under the radar is unfathomable, though sexism may be involved. Anyway,
thank heavens it's over. Anyone who loves the stories of Grace Paley
and Lorrie Moore will find another master of the form here....Just go
get the book and start reading them for yourself.” Marion Wink, Newsday
Review
“Some short story writers -- Chekhov, Alice Munro, William Trevor -- sidle up
and tap you gently on the shoulder: Come, they murmur, sit down, listen
to what I have to say. Lucia Berlin spins you around, knocks you down
and grinds your face into the dirt. You will listen to me if I have to
force you, her stories growl. But why would you make me do that,
darlin'?....Berlin's stories are full of second chances. Now readers
have another chance to confront them: bits of life, chewed up and spat
out like a wad of tobacco, bitter and rich.” Ruth Franklin, The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Lucia Berlin (1936-2004) worked brilliantly but sporadically
throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Her stories are inspired by her
early childhood in various Western mining towns; her glamorous teenage
years in Santiago, Chile; three failed marriages; a lifelong problem
with alcoholism; her years spent in Berkeley, New Mexico, and Mexico
City; and the various jobs she later held to support her writing and her
four sons. Sober and writing steadily by the 1990s, she took a visiting
writer's post at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1994 and was
soon promoted to associate professor. In 2001, in failing health, she
moved to Southern California to be near her sons. She died in 2004 in
Marina del Rey.