A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories (10th Anniversary Edition)

One of The New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. International bestseller.

A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin.

One of TheNew York Times’ 100 Best Books of the Twenty-First Century and a classic of short fiction, Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women was a global sensation upon its publication in 2015, eleven years after its author’s death. Largely unheralded throughout her peripatetic life, Berlin was a fiction writer of staggering, singular genius. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafted 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.

Written over the course of thirty years, the forty-three stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women--collected here in a 10th anniversary edition--are short fiction at its most unforgettable and original, told with unmistakable style by a master of the form.

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.