Manual For Cleaning Women - Softcover

Lucia Berlin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1447294890 ISBN 13: 9781447294894

Publisher: PAN MACMILLAN

Synopsis

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.

''I have always had faith that the best writers will rise to the top, like cream, sooner or later, and will become exactly as well-known as they should be -- their work talked about, quoted, taught, performed, filmed, set to music, anthologized. Perhaps, with the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves.'' --Lydia Davis, from the foreword

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.

About this title

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.

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.'' -- Jackie Kay, Best Holiday Reads 2015 Guardian

''[Lucia Berlin] may just be the best writer you've never heard of ... 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)

''... A testament to a writer whose explorations of society's rougher corners deserve wider attention.'' --Kirkus (Starred Review)

''Vivacity, humor, sorrow, pragmatism and sheer literary star power ... How a writer with this much appeal slipped under the radar is unfathomable. Newsday 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

''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. Nylon 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

''A Manual for Cleaning Women is a miracle of storytelling. Elle Berlin's posthumous, highly semiautobiographical collection will catapult her into a household name.'' --Marie Claire

About this edition

• Publisher: PAN MACMILLAN
• ISBN 10: 1447294890
• ISBN 13: 9781447294894
• Binding: Paperback