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
Introduced by Lydia Davis, Lucia Berlin's stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women make for one of the most remarkable unsung collections in twentieth-century American fiction.
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. Her voice is uniquely witty, anarchic and compassionate.
'With Lucia Berlin we are very far away from the parlours of Boston and New York and quite far away, too, from the fiction of manners, unless we are speaking of very bad manners . . . The writer Lucia Berlin most puts me in mind of is the late Richard Yates.' - LRB, 1999
A New York Times bestseller
'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 . . . With the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves.' Lydia Davis
For the last fifty years Lucia Berlin has been one of America's best-kept secrets, celebrated by those in the know. The first publication of this collection of her astonishing short stories, in 2015, came a decade after her death and saw her rightly recognized as one of the most important writers in twentieth-century American short fiction. Her work has been compared to Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, and Anton Chekhov.
Drawing on her own rich, itinerant life, Berlin invites the reader into a world of beauty, pain, laughter, drink and surprising moments of grace. In Mexico, Chile and the American southwest, in laundromats, hospitals, motels and bars, she crafts miracles from the everyday. Her voice is irresistible.
'In A Manual for Cleaning Women we witness the emergence of an important American writer.' New York Times
'Lucia Berlin's work is being compared to Raymond Carver . . . 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.' Sarah Churchwell, Guardian
'Full of humor and tenderness and emphatic grace.' Washington Post
'Sharp, unpredictable, vital . . . [Berlin's stories] hit you with a force the moment you happen upon them.' Jackie Kay, Observer
'This career-spanning volume should reward readers who return to it for months, years, even decades.' Independent
'Berlin writes about extremities of shame, humiliation and degradation with a ferocious elegance that allows neither bleakness not sentimentality.' New Statesman
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.
