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A Manual for Cleaning Women : : Selected Stories

Berlin, Lucia. Book - 2015 Fiction / Berlin, Lucia, Adult Book / Fiction / General / Berlin, Lucia 4 On Shelf No requests on this item Community Rating: 4.4 out of 5

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Call Number: Fiction / Berlin, Lucia, Adult Book / Fiction / General / Berlin, Lucia
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Pittsfield Branch

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Angel's laundromat -- Dr. H. A. Moynihan -- Stars and saints -- A manual for cleaning women -- My jockey -- El Tim -- Point of view -- Her first detox -- Phantom pain -- Tiger bites -- Emergency room notebook, 1977 -- Temps perdu -- Carpe diem -- Toda luna, todo anäo -- Good and bad -- Melina -- Friends -- Unmanageable -- Electric car, El Paso -- Sex appeal -- Teenage punk -- Step -- Strays -- Grief -- Bluebonnets -- La vie en rose -- Macadam -- Dear Conchi -- Fool to cry -- Mourning -- Panteoân de Dolores -- So long -- A love affair -- Let me see you smile -- Mama -- Carmen -- Silence -- Mijito -- 502 -- Here it is Saturday -- B.F. and me -- Wait a minute -- Homing.
"Stories from a lost American classic "in the same arena as Alice Munro" (Lydia Davis) "In the field of short fiction, Lucia Berlin is one of America's best kept secrets. That's it. Flat out. No mitigating conditions." --Paul Metcalf A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With her trademark blend of humor and melancholy, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday--uncovering moments of grace in the cafeterias and Laundromats of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Northern California upper classes, and from the perspective of a cleaning woman alone in a hotel dining room in Mexico City. The women of Berlin's stories are lost, but they are also strong, clever, and extraordinarily real. They are hitchhikers, hard workers, bad Christians. With the wit of Lorrie Moore and the grit of Raymond Carver, they navigate a world of jockeys, doctors, and switchboard operators. They laugh, they mourn, they drink. Berlin, a highly influential writer despite having published little in her lifetime, conjures these women from California, Mexico, and beyond. Lovers of the short story will not want to miss this remarkable collection from a master of the form"-- Provided by publisher.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Unforgettable narrators submitted by redwood on August 3, 2019, 1:44pm Great collection of stories from the late Berlin, whose prose is magical, whose plots draw on her own life in mid-century California, and of growing up in Latin America.

The way she spells out a story submitted by ccrose on August 26, 2019, 10:46pm There are no straight roads in this woman’s way of building the story up to a toppling point, where there’s no fixing anything.
Her characters have strength, fierceness if necessary., and gullibility.
Her details of people, places, verbal exchanges are colorful and original. I love the nighttime traipse to the drainage ditches to see the blue- gray cranes. Each detail seems to add conviction that some things were happening just for them.
She had a refreshing take on putting a story together, leaving behind the crisis-arc-finish method.

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PUBLISHED
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
Year Published: 2015
Description: 403 pages ; 22 cm.
Language: English
Format: Book

ISBN/STANDARD NUMBER
9780374202392

ADDITIONAL CREDITS
Emerson, Stephen.

SUBJECTS
Short stories.