A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories
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By Lucia Berlin
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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
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The first half I really enjoyed: stark, brutal, witty, honest short stories from different parts and times of the author's colourful, rich and varied life. Well written, original and sometimes surprising. At first. But by half way through they were all starting to feel pretty similar: same themes, same people and the same surprising style that was no longer surprising. Maybe another one I should read as a dip-in/dip-out.
