Lucia Berlin. (2015). A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Lucia Berlin. 2015. A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Lucia Berlin, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

Lucia Berlin. A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

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1. • role: Author
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A Manual for Cleaning Women

fullDescription

One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2015
One of Jezebel's Favorite Books of 2016
A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin.
With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the Laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians.
Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they'd ever overlooked her in the first place.
"Perhaps, with the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves." -Lydia Davis

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Dwight Garner, The New York Times
   • content:

     "In A Manual for Cleaning Women we witness the emergence of an mportant American writer, one who was mostly overlooked in her time. Ms. Berlin's stories make you marvel at the contingencies of our existence. She is the real deal. Her stories swoop low over towns and moods and minds."

2. • premium: False
   • source: Ruth Franklin, The New York Times Book Review
   • content: "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."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly
   • content: "[Lucia Berlin] might be the most interesting person you've never met . . . Life (and a long battle with alcohol) prevented her from publishing regularly, but it's all here in 43 autobiographical stories that read like one long, fascinating conversation full of switchbacks and revelations. 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. A."
4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from April 6, 2015
     Berlin, who may just be the best writer you’ve never heard of, has a gift for creating stories out of anything, often from events as apparently mundane as a trip to the laundromat. 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. Many of the strongest stories here are autobiographical, featuring Berlin’s stand-in (sometimes called Lucille, sometimes Carlotta) and her sons, husbands and lovers; a range of jobs, mostly pink collar, but occasionally, as in the title story, blue; a complicated backstory across two continents; and a problem with booze. 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. The collection could be tighter (there are over 40 stories, some only minor) and could give readers a better sense of how they’re sequenced, but this collection goes a long way toward putting Berlin, who died in 2004, back in the public eye. Agent: Katherine Fausset, Curtis Brown.

5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from June 15, 2015
     A posthumous collection of stories, almost uniformly narrated by hard-living women, that makes a case for the author as a major talent. From the 1960s through the '80s, Lucia Berlin (1936-2004) published brilliant stories for low-profile publications-her six collections all appeared with reputable but small presses. One suspects she might have had a higher profile had her subject matter been less gloomy: she mined her history of alcoholism in stories like "Her First Detox" and "Unmanageable," which detail the turmoil of the DTs and lost potential, and her work in hospitals in stories like "Emergency Room Notebook, 1977," which establishes a milieu of "rich massive coronaries, matronly phenobarbital suicides, children in swimming pools." Yet the prevailing sensibility of this book, collecting 43 of the 76 stories Berlin published, is cleareyed and even comic in the face of life hitting the skids. The title story, for instance, balances wry commentary about housecleaning work ("never make friends with cats") and deadpan observation ("I clean their coke mirror with Windex") with a sad, thrumming back story. Similarly, "Sex Appeal" is narrated by a girl watching her older cousin primp for a date only to realize that she herself is the lecherous man's lust object-a discovery Berlin presents with both a sense of surprise and foreboding. Berlin's skill at controlling the temperature of a story is best displayed in her most emotionally demanding material. In "Tiger Bites," narrated by an El Paso woman who heads to Juarez for an illegal abortion, the pain of her experience and the pieties of her family at home collide. And "Mijito," which deserves to be widely anthologized, exposes how an immigrant woman's best intentions to care for her ailing son are easily derailed by circumstance and obligation. A testament to a writer whose explorations of society's rougher corners deserve wider attention.

     COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from August 1, 2015
     Begin reading a Berlin short story and you know immediately that you are in the presence of a unique and searing literary force. Yet Berlin (19362004), published in the 1980s and 1990s by small presses, has heretofore been passionately appreciated by only a small, select audience. This revelatory volume now brings her forward to stand beside her peers, including Grace Paley, as writer and translator Lydia Davis (Can't and Won't, 2014) avers in her rousing foreword. Volume editor Stephen Emerson provides further biographical background, since Berlin's peripatetic life (Alaska, Albuquerque, Chile, the Bay Area), three marriages, four sons, and rising and falling income levels and wildly varied jobs provided her with fertile material for her tales of shattering perception, razor humor, and whiplash surprise. Berlin is exceptionally attuned to the randomness of life, its pains and pleasures, our vulnerability and resiliency. She portrays a young, grieving, acidly witty woman taking measure of the aberrations she witnesses as a cleaning woman; an abandoned, pregnant wife considering an abortion; a nurse cradling an injured jockey. As characters recur and settings and predicaments vary, Berlin unflinchingly strips bare casual and catastrophic cruelty and injustice, dramatizing, as one narrator puts it, times of intense technicolor happiness and times that were sordid and frightening. An essential collection of jazzy, jolting, incisive, wryly funny, and keenly compassionate, virtuoso tales.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

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One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2015
One of Jezebel's Favorite Books of 2016
A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin.
With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the Laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians.
Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they'd ever overlooked her in the first place.
"Perhaps, with the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves." -Lydia Davis

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Selected Stories

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