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Lucia Berlin

Biography

Lucia Berlin

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 later 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 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. Her posthumous collection, A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN, was named one of the New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of 2015.

Lucia Berlin

Books by Lucia Berlin

by Lucia Berlin - Memoir, Nonfiction

Before Lucia Berlin died, she was working on a book of previously unpublished autobiographical sketches called WELCOME HOME. The work consisted of more than 20 chapters that started in 1936 in Alaska and ended (prematurely) in 1966 in southern Mexico. In this publication of WELCOME HOME, her son Jeff Berlin is filling in the gaps with photos and letters from her eventful, romantic and tragic life. From Alaska to Argentina, Kentucky to Mexico, New York City to Chile, Berlin’s world was wide. She describes the places she lived and the people she knew with all the style, wit, heart and humor that readers fell in love with in her stories.

by Lucia Berlin - Fiction, Short Stories

In 2015, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN, a posthumous story collection by a relatively unknown writer, to widespread acclaim. The book’s author, Lucia Berlin, earned comparisons to Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, Alice Munro and Anton Chekhov. EVENING IN PARADISE is a careful selection from Berlin’s remaining stories --- 22 gems that showcase the gritty glamour that made readers fall in love with her. From Texas to Chile, Mexico to New York City, Berlin finds beauty in the darkest places and darkness in the seemingly pristine.

by Lucia Berlin - Fiction, Short Stories

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, and among switchboard operators, struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians.