A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

This collection of 43 stories should rightfully bring her the same acclaim as Jean Rhys or Raymond Carver. In A Manual for Cleaning Women, we witness the emergence of an important American writer who was largely overlooked in her time. Lucia Berlin's work is being compared to that of Raymond Carver for its similar style, dark humor, and focus on the lives of marginalized individuals. But while Carver's final stories share Berlin's keen eye for the sudden beauty in everyday lives and her ability to shift the tone of a story with a single sentence, Berlin's stories demand attention. With sharp, unpredictable characters and a powerful range of human experiences, Berlin's writing will leave a lasting impact and deserves to be ranked alongside literary greats such as Alice Munro, William Trevor, and Anton Chekhov. Her stories are full of second chances and now, readers have another chance to encounter them, to be enthralled by the raw, brilliant, and breathtakingly great writing of Lucia Berlin.