A chance to be let in on a great American secret.
Lucia Berlin (1936-2004) worked brilliantly but sporadically throughout the 1960s, '70s and '80s. Her stories are culled from 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, including as a high-school teacher, a switchboard operator, a physician's assistant, and a cleaning woman.
This selection of 43 stories . . . should by all rights see her as
lauded as Jean Rhys or Raymond Carver.
*Independent*
In A Manual for Cleaning Women we witness the emergence of an
important American writer, one who was mostly overlooked in her
time. She is the real deal.
*New York Times*
Lucia Berlin's collection of short stories, A Manual for Cleaning
Women, deserves all of the posthumous praise its author has
received . . . Her work is being compared to Raymond Carver, for
her similar oblique, colloquial style; her mordant humour; the
recurrence of alcoholics; and her interest in the lives of
working-class or marginalised people. But only Carver's very final
stories share Berlin's eye for the sudden exaltation in ordinary
lives, or her ability to shift the tone of an entire story with an
unexpected sentence.
*Guardian*
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.
*New York Times Book Review*
[Berlin's] stories are peopled with sharp, unpredictable, vital
characters (often drunk!). They hit you with a force the moment you
happen upon them.
*Observer*
Raw and funny and breathtakingly great.
*New Yorker*
Berlin's stories . . . alternate between light and dark so
seamlessly and suddenly that a certain emotion barely fades before
you feel something abruptly different . . . The result is a
fictional world of wide-ranging impact, a powerful chiaroscuro that
manages to encompass the full spectrum of human experience . . .
[Berlin] deserves to be ranked alongside Alice Munro, Raymond
Carver, and Anton Chekhov. She excels at pacing, structure,
dialogue, characterization, description, and every other aspect of
the form.
*The Boston Globe*
[Berlin's] writing really soars.
*Literary Review*
There is a seemingly effortless style to these beautifully
observant tales of detoxing, lapsing and old affections.
*Sunday Express*
This career-spanning volume should reward readers who return to it
for months, years, even decades . . . Berlin's stories offer few
answers, and no easy routes to redemption, but empathy pulses.
*Independent*
Berlin writes about extremities of shame, humiliation and
degradation with a ferocious elegance that allows neither bleakness
not sentimentality . . . The editorial arrangement by Berlin's
friend Stephen Emerson is particularly sensitive to the jazzy
musicality of the stories . . . These perfectly poised cadences are
the work of a writer who knew exactly how good she was.
*New Statesman*
Full of humor and tenderness and emphatic grace . . . Those not
lucky enough to have yet encountered the writing of Lucia Berlin
are in for some high-grade pleasure when they make first
contact.
*Washington Post*
A Manual for Cleaning Women is a miracle of storytelling.
*Elle*
Here's prose to fall hard for, from the first beautifully candid
paragraph to the last. As Berlin's characters confide in the reader
and in each other, somehow, through the "ifs" and "buts," laundry
and flower clocks, grace and catastrophe, a mesh is woven that
captures life itself. I'm bowled over by her.
*Helen Oyeyemi*
What a thrilling, welcome discovery this collection is. These are
stories to beguile, fascinate and surprise. You are never sure what
will happen next. As soon as I'd finished this book, I had to turn
back to the beginning and start again.
*Maggie O'Farrell*
Berlin's writing is characterised by an enormous appetite for life,
for humour and for love . . . This almost chatty style is undercut
by brutal one-liners and swift reversals that, along with skilful
narrative shaping, remind you that these are painstakingly crafted
stories.
*Guardian*
Berlin's literary model is Chekhov, but there are extra-literary
models too, including the extended jazz solo, with its surges,
convolutions, and asides. This is writing of a very high order.
*London Review of Books*
[The stories] are set in the places Berlin knows best: Chile,
Mexico, the Southwest and California, and they have the casual,
straightforward, immediately intimate style that distinguishes her
work . . . [They] are told in an easy conversational voice and they
go from start to finish with a swift and often lyrical economy . .
. Berlin's stories capture and communicate these moments of grace
and cast a lovely, lazy light that lasts. She is one of our finest
writers.
*San Francisco Chronicle*
Lucia Berlin might be the most interesting person you've never met
. . . Every detox ward, dingy Laundromat, and sunbaked Mexican
palapa spills across the page in sentences so bright and fierce and
full of wild color that you'll want to turn each one over just to
see how she does it. And then go back and read them all again.
*Entertainment Weekly*
[Lucia Berlin] may just be the best writer you've never heard of .
. . Imagine a less urban Grace Paley, with a similar talent for
turning the net of resentments and affections among family members
into stories that carry more weight than their casual,
conversational tone might initially suggest . . . Berlin's offbeat
humor, get-on-with-it realism, and ability to layer details that
echo across stories and decades give her book a tremendous staying
power . . . [A Manual for Cleaning Women] goes a long way toward
putting Berlin, who died in 2004, back in the public eye.
*Publishers Weekly (starred review)*
Lucia Berlin has long been overlooked as one of America's best
short story writers, and it only takes readers the first couple of
pages to recognize that . . . Reminiscent of Raymond Carver with a
dash of survivor's humor, which makes even the bleakest tales
thoroughly enjoyable.
*Nylon*
A major talent . . . A testament to a writer whose explorations of
society's rougher corners deserve wider attention.
*Kirkus (Starred Review)*
Berlin's posthumous, highly semiautobiographical collection will
catapult her into a household name.
*Marie Claire*
How a writer with this much appeal slipped under the radar is
unfathomable . . . 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.
*Newsday*
Berlin's ability to gaze into a person's soul is reflected in her
writing it is incisive, and the boldness of the prose jumps off the
page . . . Poignant, comic and beautifully observed.
*The Lady*
[The stories] reel you in with their warmth, humour and a cast of
ordinary women leading very real, very messy lives.
*Red*
This was a brilliant woman. [Berlin's] work transcends funny and
shows us the absurd. She doesn't let her characters hide behind
artifice or sensationalism or substances, as much as they might
like to. Reading these stories, you get the sense that this is what
she wanted for herself: to let go of the bullshit. As a result, the
transformation she provides is visceral and startling.
*Electric Lit*
Begin reading a Berlin short story and you know immediately that
you are in the presence of a unique and searing literary force . .
. This revelatory volume now brings her forward to stand beside her
peers.
*Booklist*
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