More Stories
18,00€
The collection of selected stories, “A Manual for Cleaning Women” (first edition in Greek in 2018), introduced to the international public ten years after her death, a great author who had been unjustly forgotten. “Evening in Paradise,” Lucia Berlin’s second collection, confirms her place in the pantheon of American letters, equal to that of Raymond Carver and Alice Munro.
The collection of selected stories, “A Manual for Cleaning Women” (first edition in Greek in 2018), introduced to the international public ten years after her death, a great author who had been unjustly forgotten. “Evening in Paradise,” Lucia Berlin’s second collection, confirms her place in the pantheon of American letters, equal to that of Raymond Carver and Alice Munro.
The twenty-two short stories in the book take the reader on a journey to the places where the author lived, in Texas, Chile, New York, Mexico. Introduce him to the most diverse human types, from musicians and painters to drug dealers and restless teens to spectacle legends such as John Huston, Ava Gardner, and Liz Taylor. Wherever she is, whatever she describes, Berlin captures the people’s loneliness, reveals the beauty behind ugliness, and always discerns hope in the dark. Some of her heroes struggle with fame, others with the monotony of an unbearable, monotonous daily life, others with the deprivations of bohemian life. At their root, autobiographically, her stories transform with imagination and tenderness a life marked by constant movements, overwhelming emotional upheavals, and existential quests. Her subtle humor becomes a vehicle for overcoming every ordeal. This excavation hoe brings to the surface the little wonders of every life, which her elegant pen turns into literary diamonds.
Paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, Berlin’s prose is vivid and lush — a rich and tactile landscape that often overwhelms the senses… But perhaps above all, she is a master of sound and rhythm.
And yet, Berlin is not only a soulful chronicler of the lost corners of America, whose semi-autobiographical stories brim with red caliche clay, arroyos, drainage ditches and smelter towns. She is not only a writer of vivid bursts of language. She is also a distinctly female voice, a raspy Marlene Dietrich. She was a beautiful woman who dared to know it, who could feel a bullet zing against the car and say, “‘Hot damn!’ … An adventure,” and also write, with urgent honesty, of motherhood and love. In death, she became the patron saint of every coastal cool girl, every exhausted mother, every daydreamer of plane tickets, every chaser of her next broken heart.
Lucia Berlin’s stories flow like a big, pristine, restless river.
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Lucia Berlin
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