A Manual for Cleaning Women, Lucia Berlin
A Manual for Cleaning Women, Lucia Berlin
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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.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.

About Lucia Berlin

Lucia Berlin (1936–2004) was an associate professor of writing at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the author of A Manual for Cleaning Women.

About Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis was awarded the 2003 French-American Foundation Translation Prize for her translation of Marcel Proust’s Swann's Way and was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of such modern writers as Maurice Blanchot and Michel Leiris. She is the author of a novel, The End of the Story, and several volumes of stories, including Varieties of Disturbance, a National Book Award finalist, and Can’t and Won’t, a New York Times bestseller. In 2009 her stories were brought together in one volume, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which was called “a grand cumulative achievement” and “one of the great, strange American literary contributions” by James Wood in The New Yorker and “one of the great books in recent literature” by Dan Chiasson in The New York Review of Books. A MacArthur Fellow, Davis lives near Albany, New York.

About Thom Rivera

Thom Rivera is a multiple Earphones award-winning narrator. He is also a classically trained television, film, theatre, and voice actor. Based in Los Angeles, he spent twelve years living and working in New York City. He has toured nationally and performed at regional theatres and Shakespeare Festivals throughout the US. On television, he can be seen in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, New Girl, The Mindy Project, and the CBS series Zoo.

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 a Los Angeles–based voice talent with hundreds of commercials and promos under her belt. She records books on a regular basis and has been nominated for several Audie Awards.

About Bernadette Dunne

Bernadette Dunne has been honored to narrate the work of some of the finest fiction and nonfiction writers of our time, including Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, and Sandra Day O'Connor. The winner of more than a dozen Earphones Awards and a three-time Audie Award nominee, she has voiced countless bestsellers, including Memoirs of a Geisha, The Devil Wears Prada, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. She studied at The Royal National Theater and lives in New York.

About Kyla Garcia

Kyla Garcia is an AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator. She received her BFA in acting from Rutgers University. She has played Lady Macbeth at the Globe Theatre in London.

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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