Lucia Berlin

A Manual for Cleaning Women

and

Evening in Paradise

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When these two books came across my desk, I’d never heard of Lucia Berlin before, and I’m so grateful that I finally have. The semi autobiographical short stories in these two collections are succinct, dynamic, and achingly human. They are set in El Paso, a Mexican border town, a Montana mining camp, the New Mexico desert, the city of Berkeley, elite Chilean society, and Mexico’s coastal jungles. Many stories deal with family dysfunction and alcoholism, reminiscent of Raymond Carver’s. Like Carver’s, Berlin’s prose is deceptively direct. But her stories also investigate what it means to be a daughter, a wife, a lover, a mother, and a worker. They reveal how these roles confined her and simultaneously imbued her life with vibrant beauty and trembling uncertainty.