A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin audiobook

A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

By Lucia Berlin
Edited and with an introduction by Stephen Emerson
Foreword by Lydia Davis
Read by various narrators

Blackstone Publishing 9780374202392

Unabridged

Format : Library CD (In Stock)
  • 3 Formats: CD
  • 3 Formats: Library CD
  • 3 Formats: MP3 CD

  • ISBN: 9781504676533

  • ISBN: 9781504676519

  • ISBN: 9781504676526

Runtime: 14.78 Hours
Category: Fiction
Audience: Adult
Language: English
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Summary

Summary

Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award

Winner of a 2016 Voice Arts Award for Outstanding Casting 

Shortlisted for the 2015 Kirkus Prize for Fiction

An Entertainment Weekly Best Book of 2015

A 2015 New York Times Book Review Notable Book

A 2015 New York Times Top 10 Book

A NPR’s Great Reads Selection of 2015

A 2015 Boston Globe Book of the Year

A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2015

A Literary Hub Pick of the Decade's 10 Best Short Story Collections

A BuzzFeed Books Pick for Best Fiction of 2015

A Flavorwire Pick for Best Fiction of 2015

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2015

One of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2015

“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 foreword

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.

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.

Editorial Reviews

Editorial Reviews

“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
“Berlin is exceptionally attuned to the randomness of life, its pains and pleasures, our vulnerability and resiliency…An essential collection of jazzy, jolting, incisive, wryly funny, and keenly compassionate, virtuoso tales.” —Booklist (starred review)
“A testament to a writer whose explorations of society’s rougher corners deserve wider attention.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Berlin’s writing, both tempered and elastic, provides a perfect springboard, and the narrators use it to full advantage: gracefully leaping, twisting, and—when called for—landing with force on the emotional heart of each story. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.” —AudioFile
“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)

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Author

Author Bio: Lucia Berlin

Author Bio: 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.

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Details

Details

Available Formats : CD, Library CD, MP3 CD
Category: Fiction
Runtime: 14.78
Audience: Adult
Language: English

1-800-621-0182

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