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A Manual for Cleaning Women Spiral-Bound | 2016-08-02

Lucia Berlin

★★★★☆+ from 10,001 to 50,000 ratings

$20.29 - Free Shipping
Stories from a lost American classic "in the same arena as Alice Munro" (Lydia Davis)

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"In the field of short fiction, Lucia Berlin is one of America's best kept secrets. That's it. Flat out. No mitigating conditions."—Paul Metcalf

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.

• For readers of Lydia Davis and Alice Munro

Publisher: Macmillan
Original Binding: Trade Paperback
Pages: 432 pages
ISBN-10: 1250094739
Item Weight: 0.7 lbs
Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.2 inches
Customer Reviews: 4 out of 5 stars 10,001 to 50,000 ratings
"In A Manual for Cleaning Women we witness the emergence of an important 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."--Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"Lucia Berlin might be the most interesting person you've never met."--Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A)

LUCIA BERLIN (1936-2004) worked brilliantly but sporadically throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. An alcoholic most her life, she got sober and began 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. She died in 2004 in Marina del Rey.