One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2015
One of Jezebel's Favorite Books of 2016
"I have always had faith that the best writers will rise to the top, like cream, sooner or later, and will become exactly as well-known as they should be-their work talked about, quoted, taught, performed, filmed, set to music, anthologized. Perhaps, with the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves." -Lydia Davis
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, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians.
 Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they'd ever overlooked her in the first place.

A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

Literature & Fiction

Berlin, Lucia

Literary

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

"Berlin probably deserved a Pulitzer Prize." ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE. Named one of the Best Books of 2018 by The Boston Globe, Kirkus, and Lit Hub. Named a Fall Read by Buzzfeed, ELLE, TIME, Nylon, The Boston Globe, Vulture, Newsday, HuffPost, Bustle, The A.V. Club, The Millions, BUST, Reinfery29, Fast Company and MyDomaine. A collection of previously uncompiled stories from the short-story master and literary sensation Lucia Berlin
In 2015, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published A Manual for Cleaning Women, a posthumous story collection by a relatively unknown writer, to wild, widespread acclaim. It was a New York Times bestseller; the paper’s Book Review named it one of the Ten Best Books of 2015; and NPR, Time, Entertainment Weekly, The Guardian, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and other outlets gave the book rave reviews. 
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―twenty-two 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. Evening in Paradise is an essential piece of Berlin’s oeuvre, a jewel-box follow-up for new and old fans.

Evening in Paradise: More Stories

United States

"As the case with her fiction, Berlin's pieces here are as faceted as the brightest diamond." --Kristin Iversen, NYLON NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE. Named a Fall Read by Buzzfeed, Vulture, Newsday and HuffPost A compilation of sketches, photographs, and letters, Welcome Home is an essential nonfiction companion to the stories by Lucia Berlin
Before Lucia Berlin died, she was working on a book of previously unpublished autobiographical sketches called Welcome Home. The work consisted of more than twenty chapters that started in 1936 in Alaska and ended (prematurely) in 1966 in southern Mexico. In our 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. And the writing here is, as we’ve come to expect, dazzling. She describes the places she lived and the people she knew with all the style and wit and heart and humor that readers fell in love with in her stories. Combined with letters from and photos of friends and lovers, Welcome Home is an essential nonfiction companion to A Manual for Cleaning Women and Evening in Paradise.

Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs and Letters

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Love, Loosha: The Letters of Lucia Berlin and Kenward Elmslie

Review\n"An intimate, touching portrait of a friendship, one bound by a love of literature."--Publishers Weekly\n"This book, the correspondence of two good writers and close friends, presents completely new material written very well and at the same time in a comfortable and natural style. The letters are personal, warm, witty, imaginative, detailed, sometimes lyrical, and, most compellingly, written with frankness, honesty, and good humor. Here, we can look 'behind' their art and witness what goes on in their day-to-day lives, how they experience moments of joy or well-being, how they suffer and try to laugh off their suffering. Above all, the compelling pleasure of the book is the opportunity to spend personal, intimate time in the company of these lively, intelligent, compassionate, and mutually loving people."--Lydia Davis, author of Essays One and Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and The City of Arles\n"More than a delightful record of a unique literary friendship, more than a chronicle of how Lucia and Kenward negotiated distance, patronage, moodiness, and the volatility of two artistic temperaments, Love, Loosha is a splendid treatise on aging out of lives in which decisions were made for pleasure and art more than for practicality or stability. A luscious and lyric counter argument to the dangers of a life lived in pursuit of beauty. Brava. Bravo."--Pam Houston, author of Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country\n"These letters read like a literary love affair between two brilliant writers who aim to delight, entertain, and confide in each other. What Berlin says of Elmslie's side of the correspondence is true of both: 'Beautiful writing, good gossip, funny stories. . . . You and I have known remarkable people.'"--Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, editor of Collected Poems: Edward Dorn\nAt the time of her death in 2004, Lucia Berlin was known as a brilliant writer of short stories, beloved by other writers but never achieving wide readership or acclaim. That changed in 2015 with the publication of A Manual for Cleaning Women, a collection of some of her best work. Almost overnight, Lucia Berlin became an international bestseller.\nLove, Loosha is the extraordinary collection of letters between Lucia Berlin and her dear friend, the poet and Broadway lyricist Kenward Elmslie. Written between 1994 and 2004, their correspondence reveals the lives, work, and literary obsessions of two great American writers. Berlin and Elmslie discuss publishing and social trends, political correctness, and offending others and being offended. They gossip. They dish. They entertain.\nLove, Loosha is an intimate conversation between two friends--one in which we are invited to participate, and one that will give fans of Lucia Berlin and Kenward Elmslie much pleasure and fresh insight into their lives and work.

Elmslie, Kenward

Regional U.S.

High Road Books

Homesick: New and Selected Stories

Winner of the 1991 Before Columbus / American Book Award 
 For this, her first major collection, Lucia Berlin gathered the best of her work from 1960 to 1990, including stories from The Atlantic and Saul Bellow's little magazine The Noble Savage and the immortal "My Jockey," winner of the Jack London Short Prize, 1985.

Black Sparrow Press

This collection of short stories includes such titles as "Angels Laundromat," "Her first detox," "Noel, 1974," and "Manual for cleaning women"

Black Sparrow Pr

This collection of short stories includes such titles as "Angels Laundromat," "Her first detox," "Noel, 1974," and "Manual for cleaning women"

Lucia Berlin is widely recognized as a master of the short story. This collection captures distilled moments of crisis or epiphany, placing the protagonists in moments of stress or personal strain, and all told in an almost offhand, matter-of-fact voice. Weaving through the places she loved―Chile, Mexico, the Southwest, and California―each story delivers a poignant moment that lingers in the mind, not resolved, not decoded, but resonating, as questions of the human condition always do, in the heart of the reader.

So Long: Stories 1987-1992

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Berlin, Lucia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Berlin, Lucia

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Berlin, Lucia. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

Evening in Paradise: More Stories

Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs and Letters

Love, Loosha: The Letters of Lucia Berlin and Kenward Elmslie

Love, Loosha: The Letters of Lucia Berlin and Kenward Elmslie

Homesick: New and Selected Stories

Homesick: New and Selected Stories

Homesick: New and Selected Stories

So Long: Stories 1987-1992

So Long: Stories 1987-1992