Evening in Paradise

Description

A collection of previously uncompiled stories from the short-story master and literary sensation Lucia Berlin – author of A Manual for Cleaning Women. The chance to join ‘the Revival of the Great Lucia Berlin’ (New York Times) ‘Raw, elliptical , devilishly funny tales’ Observer Ranging from Texas, to Chile, to New Mexico and New York, in Evening in Paradise Berlin writes about the good, the bad and everything in between: struggling young mothers, husbands who pack their bags and leave in the middle of the night, wives looking back at their first marriage from the distance of their second . . . The publication of A Manual for Cleaning Women, Lucia Berlin’s dazzling collection of short stories, marked the rediscovery of a writer whose talent had gone unremarked by many. The incredible reaction to Lucia’s writing – her ability to capture the beauty and ugliness that coexist in everyday lives, the extraordinary honesty and magnetism with which she draws on her own history to breathe life into her characters – included calls for her contribution to American literature to be as celebrated as that of Raymond Carver. Evening in Paradise is a careful selection from Lucia Berlin’s remaining stories – a jewel-box follow-up for her hungry fans.

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.