Her voice is uniquely witty, anarchic and compassionate. With extraordinary honesty and magnetism, Lucia Berlin invites us into her rich, itinerant life: the drink and the mess and the pain and the beauty and the moments of surprise and of grace. The New York Times bestseller 'This selection of 43 stories should by all rights see Lucia Berlin as lauded as Jean Rhys or Raymond Carver' Independent The stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women make for one of the most remarkable unsung collections in twentieth-century American fiction.
This collection of 43 of Berlin's stories - which is introduced by Lydia Davis, another, much better known "writer's writer" - aims to bring Berlin the recognition she never enjoyed in her own rocky lifetime.īerlin's stories are mostly written in first person: You can imagine the narrators sitting down next to you in a bar after work, ordering their first bottom-shelf shot and, unbidden, starting to talk about their crappy day.Description for A Manual for Cleaning Women Paperback.
She was the kind of writer other writers knew about, and the literary godmother, it seems to me, of tough female writers like Jennifer Egan and Rachel Kushner. Unlike cleaning ladies, divorcees and alcoholics are a dime a dozen in fiction, but Berlin puts her own jagged imprint on their tales.īerlin died in 2004 she'd been publishing her stories for decades in magazines and small-press books. In addition, she was a divorced mother of four and an alcoholic. Cleaning ladies are rare characters in literary fiction so, too, are clerical workers, hospital staff and switchboard operators, but they populate Lucia Berlin's stories because Berlin herself held those kinds of jobs. My grandmother worked all her life cleaning houses and offices, so it's hard for me to resist a short story collection called A Manual for Cleaning Women. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title A Manual for Cleaning Women Subtitle Selected Stories Author Lucia Berlin, Stephen Emerson, et al
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