A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

4 stars (15 reviews)

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.

6 editions

Raw, real.

5 stars

For various reasons (let's count in the fact that this book is almost 400 pages long), it took me so long to read this book. I didn't know Lucia Berlin before randomly choosing this selection of her best short-stories. 90% of the books I have in my e-book reader are the result of weird lists of "books to read" I've found on the internet while I was panicking about having an empty e-book reader. So I don't know to which category this book used to belong. Was it in the "book to read written by women"? "Book to read if you want to get into contemporary short-stories"? I digress. It's difficult to me to say "I loved this book" because it sounds rather superficial and not accurate. It's complicated, as they say. I was fascinated by this book. Many narrators take the pen, but they seem to be linked together …

Review of 'A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

A bit of a slog. It's long, often tedious, and is infused with pain: alcoholism, addiction, emotional and physical abuse. Loneliness. Our deep yearning for connection. It took me over a week to read, it wasn't a book I was eager to pick back up.

And yet... her writing, her sensibility; tenderness, compassion, wistfulness. Berlin had tremendous insight and awareness. Her writing is graceful, with a simple clarity kind of like a summer mid-morning: not diffuse but not harsh, just the kind of light that lets you take it all in, the good and bad with less of the judgment than our brain so regularly tries to slap onto everyone. I'm really struck by how complex her characters can be - even in the shortest of the stories we see lives rich with ambiguity and depth.

The stories themselves — and this may be a slight spoiler but I would've …

Review of 'A Manual for Cleaning Women' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

 The truth? I was worried that this collection of [a:Lucia Berlin|157697|Lucia Berlin|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1463323021p2/157697.jpg]'s short stories was going to be a rant about the well-to-do by an oppressed minority—a biography of a housekeeper from the Philippines who works in Beverly Hills, say. That kind of writing has its place and value, but in my case reading it is a been there, done that proposition.
 These stories have great depth and variety and are so brilliant that I'm ashamed never to have heard of Berlin (1936–2004) before reading them. They are deep and at times disturbing, but only in a way that makes you want to read more of them. Some critics compare her to Raymond Carver, but I agree more with those who emphasize that Berlin was entirely her own.
 If you are the kind of reader who prefers novels to short stories, this would be a good book for you. The …

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