A Manual for Cleaning Women, Lucia Berlin
A Manual for Cleaning Women, Lucia Berlin
3 Rating(s)
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A Manual for Cleaning Women
Selected Stories

Author: Lucia Berlin, Stephen Emerson, Lydia Davis

Narrator: Thom Rivera, Dawn Harvey, Carol Monda, Hillary Huber, Bernadette Dunne, Kyla Garcia, various narrators

Unabridged: 14 hr 47 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/19/2016

Synopsis

“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, from the forewordA 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.Listeners will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they’d ever overlooked her in the first place.

About Lucia Berlin

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.

About Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis was born in Northampton, Massachusetts and educated at Barnard College. Her novels and short stories have received numerous awards, including the Whiting Foundation Writers’ Award for Fiction, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and the Man Booker International Prize. Her collection, Varieties of Disturbance: Stories was a National Book Award finalist. She has also produced several new translations of French literary classics, including Proust’s Swann’s Way and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Davis is one of only three authors to have their work featured in the Best American Short Stories and the Best American Poetry series.

About Dawn Harvey

Dawn Harvey has been performing for as long as she has been able to walk and talk and sing. She was already a stage and film actress when she began her voice-over career and now is an AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator.

About Carol Monda

Carol Monda is an Earphones Award–winning narrator and accomplished voice-over artist. She is also an award-winning actor known for her work in Out of Season, After You Left, and The Gentlemen.

About Hillary Huber

Hillary Huber is one of the most successful voice talents in Los Angeles. Recent books read for Blackstone Audio include Him, Her, Him Again, the End of Him by Patricia Marx, A Field of Darkness by Cornelia Read, and A Map of Glass by Jane Urquhart.

About Bernadette Dunne

Bernadette Dunne is the winner of numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and has twice been nominated for the prestigious Audie Award. She studied at the Royal National Theatre in London and the Studio Theater in Washington, DC, and has appeared at the Kennedy Center and off Broadway.

About Kyla Garcia

Kyla Garcia is an AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator. Born and raised in Hoboken, New Jersey, she discovered acting at the age of eight when she played Lady Macbeth in a children’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy. She made her off-Broadway debut at fifteen when she played Dorothy in Oz: A Twisted Musical. Eleven years after she discovered her passion for acting, she would go on to play Lady Macbeth once again in London at the Globe Theatre, where she studied Shakespeare during her third year at Mason Gross School of the Arts. She received her BFA in acting from Rutgers University.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Dave on August 01, 2015

My foundation as a writer was shaped by these stories. I first read most of them in 1984, when I went to grad school in writing at U of Colorado in Boulder. Lucia was one of several wonderful profs I had there, but it was her stories alone that I read, with awe, and said, "THAT is what I want to do!......more

Goodreads review by emma on January 20, 2022

my becoming-a-genius project, part 16...maybe? (and one of my favorites of the year! find my list: [URL not allowed]) if you've had the misfortune of digitally encountering me before, you probably know what that means: i pick up the collected works (almost no entries have actua......more

Goodreads review by Julie on April 22, 2017

I know already, just four stories in, that this will be a 5-Star read for me. And that a few weeks from now—because I am reading slowly, to savor each bit— I will struggle to pick my favorites from the forty-two short stories collected here. So this review contains tidbits from those stories which m......more

Quotes

“Berlin’s electrifying posthumous collection A Manual for Cleaning Women is a miracle of storytelling economy, showcasing this largely unheard-of writer’s genius for streetwise erudition and sudden, soul-baring epiphanies.” Elle

“These [stories]…illuminate a gritty world…Infused with Berlin’s caustic humor and a sense of self-discovery…the most touching stories have fun with the foreboding.” Time

“Sentences so bright and fierce and full of wild color that you’ll want to turn each one over just to see how she does it. And then go back and read them all again. Grade A.” Entertainment Weekly

“[These stories] showcase a singular if unsung American voice.” Vogue

“Women who behave badly oscillate beautifully between funny ha-ha and funny-sad in these perfectly clipped, nuanced stories.” Marie Claire

“Berlin’s stories make you marvel at the contingencies of our existence. She is the real deal. Her stories swoop low over towns and moods and minds.” New York Times

“Berlin’s stories are full of second chances. Now readers have another chance to confront them: bits of life, chewed up and spat out like a wad of tobacco, bitter and rich.” New York Times Book Review

“Berlin’s tales of addiction and violence, formally unpredictable and drolly grotesque, defy our expectations for working-class fiction.” Newsday

“Brings together forty-three of the unconventional, unnerving stories Berlin wrote over the course of thirty years…offer[ing] unusually detailed portraits of working-class lives.” New Republic

“[Lucia Berlin] may just be the best writer you’ve never heard of…Berlin’s offbeat humor, get-on-with-it realism, and ability to layer details that echo across stories and decades give her book a tremendous staying power.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Awards

  • Kirkus Prize
  • Publishers Weekly Best Book
  • Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books
  • New York Times Top 10 Book
  • Boston Globe Book of the Year
  • BuzzFeed Books Pick
  • New York Times Book Review Notable Book
  • NPR’s Great Reads
  • Entertainment Weekly Best Book
  • San Francisco Chronicle Best Book
  • A Flavorwire Pick
  • Voice Arts Award
  • Literary Hub Pick
  • AudioFile Earphones Award
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