lucia berlin a manual for cleaning women selected stories

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. 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. A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories Lucia Berlin Macmillan, Fiction - 403 pages 21 Reviews Reviews aren't verified, but Google checks for and removes fake. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title A Manual for Cleaning Women Subtitle Selected Stories Author Lucia Berlin, Stephen Emerson, et al

Lucia berlin a manual for cleaning women selected stories