Table of Contents

Unit - 1: The Musical Vanity Boxes Unit - 2: Sometimes in Summer Unit - 3: Andado: A Gothic Romance Unit - 4: Dust to Dust Unit - 5: Itinerary Unit - 6: Lead Street, Albuquerque Unit - 7: Noël. Texas. 1956 Unit - 8: The Adobe House with a Tin Roof Unit - 9: A Foggy Day Unit - Cherry Blossom Time: 10 Unit - 11: Evening in Paradise Unit - 12: La Barca de la Ilusión Unit - 13: My Life Is an Open Book Unit - 14: The Wives Unit - 15: Noël, 1974 Unit - 16: The Pony Bar, Oakland Unit - 17: Daughters Unit - 18: Rainy Day Unit - 19: Our Brother’s Keeper Unit - 20: Lost in the Louvre Unit - 21: Luna Nueva Unit - 22: Sombra

Promotional Information

From the author of A Manual for Cleaning Women: a collection of previously un-compiled stories from the short-story master and literary sensation Lucia Berlin.

About the Author

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 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 in 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. A collection of her stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women, was published to great acclaim in 2015.

Reviews

Blessedly, a second volume with 22 more stories is in no way second rate but rather features more seductive, sparkling autofiction with narrators whose names echo the author's in settings and situations that come from her roller-coaster biography... No dead author is more alive on the page than Berlin: funny, dark, and so in love with the world.
*Kirkus starred review*

Any publication of hers is a major cause for celebration, as far as I'm concerned.
*Maggie O'Farrell, Guardian, Best summer books 2018*

A Manual for Cleaning Women deserves all of the posthumous praise its author has received... [Berlin's] work is being compared to Raymond Carver... But only Carver's very final stories share Berlin's eye for the sudden exaltation in ordinary lives.
*The Guardian on A Manual for Cleaning Women, 'Best Books of 2015'"*

In A Manual for Cleaning Women we witness the emergence of an important American writer, one who was mostly overlooked in her time. She is the real deal.
*New York Times on A Manual for Cleaning Women*