A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories Audiobook

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)

• “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)