Lucia Berlin was born in Juneau, Alaska in 1936 and died in 2004 on her own birthday at the age of sixty-eight, a full-circle distinction she shares with William Shakespeare and Merle Haggard. Like this from “The Musical Vanity Boxes,” as Raúl, a father from Juarez, leads young “Lucha” and her Syrian best friend Hope back over the border to El Paso: “Gentle, like the pull of a dowser’s branch, drawing our bony bodies into the pachuco beat of his walk, so light, slow, swinging.”īerlin’s first posthumous collected stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women (2015), showcased her extraordinary and underappreciated talent and her fantastic range the second, Evening in Paradise, recently published alongside a companion volume of her memoir and letters, presumes to show us this and more: her life. Dunes, with waves and patterns like in postcards from the Painted Desert.” Rather than create pauses, her descriptions ignite the story, keep it in motion. Three- or four-foot sand dunes in every room. Torn and rusted venetian blinds rattling in the wind. Take this succession from the story “Strays,” set in a desolate rehab facility outside Albuquerque: “Fallen-down barracks.
Less drag, high velocity the story propels forward.
Her deliberate abbreviations slipstream off one another. There are masters of the paragraph and masters of the sentence Lucia Berlin is the master of the fragment. PHOTO: BUDDY BERLIN/LITERARY ESTATE OF LUCIA BERLIN Evening in Paradise is an essential piece of Berlin's oeuvre, a jewel-box follow-up for new and old fans.LUCIA BERLIN IN ALBUQUERQUE, 1961. From Texas to Chile, Mexico to New York City, Berlin finds beauty in the darkest places and darkness in the seemingly pristine. Evening in Paradise is a careful selection from Berlin's remaining stories-twenty-two gems that showcase the gritty glamour that made readers fall in love with her. The book's author, Lucia Berlin, earned comparisons to Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, Alice Munro, and Anton Chekhov. It was a New York Times bestseller the paper's Book Review named it one of the Ten Best Books of 2015 and NPR, Time, Entertainment Weekly, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and other outlets gave the book rave reviews. In 2015, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published A Manual for Cleaning Women, a posthumous story collection by a relatively unknown writer, to wild, widespread acclaim. A collection of previously uncompiled stories from the short-story master and literary sensation Lucia Berlin
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