Praise for A Manual for Cleaning Women
'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.' Guardian
'An important American writer . . . She is the real deal.' New York Times
'Sharp, unpredictable, vital characters . . . [Berlin's stories] hit you with a force the moment you happen upon them.' Jackie Kay, Observer
'This selection of forty-three stories . . . should by all rights see [Lucia Berlin] as lauded as Jean Rhys or Raymond Carver.' Independent

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 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 in 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. A collection of her stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women, was published to great acclaim in 2015.

Unit - 1: The Musical Vanity Boxes Unit - 2: Sometimes in Summer Unit - 3: Andado: A Gothic Romance Unit - 4: Dust to Dust Unit - 5: Itinerary Unit - 6: Lead Street, Albuquerque Unit - 7: Noël. Texas. 1956 Unit - 8: The Adobe House with a Tin Roof Unit - 9: A Foggy Day Unit - Cherry Blossom Time: 10 Unit - 11: Evening in Paradise Unit - 12: La Barca de la Ilusión Unit - 13: My Life Is an Open Book Unit - 14: The Wives Unit - 15: Noël, 1974 Unit - 16: The Pony Bar, Oakland Unit - 17: Daughters Unit - 18: Rainy Day Unit - 19: Our Brother's Keeper Unit - 20: Lost in the Louvre Unit - 21: Luna Nueva Unit - 22: Sombra