A Manual for Cleaning Women

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' - IndependentThe 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. Celebrated for many years by those in the
know, she is about to become - a decade after her death - the writer
everyone is talking about. The collection will be introduced by Lydia
Davis.'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