A Manual for Cleaning Women

One of the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century The world just goes along. Nothing much matters, you know? I mean really matters. but then sometimes, just for a second, you get this grace, this belief that it does matter, a whole lot. With an introduction from Lydia Davis Lucia Berlin's stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women make for one of the most remarkable unsung collections in twentieth-century American fiction. With extraordinary honesty and magnetism, Lucia Berlin invites us into her rich, itinerant life: the drink and the mess and the pain and the beauty and the moments of surprise and of grace, with a voice is witty, anarchic, compassionate, and completely unique. 'The 43 stories brought together in A Manual for Cleaning Women make a powerful claim for far wider recognition and celebration of her talents . . . Wonderful' - The Guardian Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.

Lucia Berlin (1936-2004) worked brilliantly but sporadically throughout the 1960s, '70s and '80s. Her stories are culled from 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, including as a high-school teacher, a switchboard operator, a physician's assistant, and a cleaning woman. Two collections of her work were published posthumously: A Manual for Cleaning Women and Evening in Paradise.