---
product_id: 33115395
title: "A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories"
brand: "lucia berlin"
price: "353 Lei"
currency: RON
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 9
url: https://www.desertcart.ro/products/33115395-a-manual-for-cleaning-women-selected-stories
store_origin: RO
region: Romania
---

# A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

**Brand:** lucia berlin
**Price:** 353 Lei
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

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- **What is this?** A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by lucia berlin
- **How much does it cost?** 353 Lei with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.ro](https://www.desertcart.ro/products/33115395-a-manual-for-cleaning-women-selected-stories)

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## Description

A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Details
  

*by M***S on Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 20, 2016*

As Elizabeth Geoghegan put it so beautifully in her piece in The Paris Review, it’s the voice that pulls you in."A Manual For Cleaning Women" is brilliant, one-of-a-kind, memorable, compelling and all of that.Geohegan: “The moves she makes in her fiction shadow the peripatetic nature of intimate conversation, and in turn, her peripatetic life. She can transport you from the alcoholics of El Paso to the inmates of Oakland as easily as she can make you believe she was capable of loading a lethal dose into her addict husband’s syringe before going to the hospital to deliver his child. Each of her stories unfolds in such unexpected ways you nearly forget where the tale has begun. Then she suddenly brings you back and knocks the wind out of you with one of her singular last lines.”Read the opening foreword by Lydia Davis, and you’ll have no choice but to dive into the stories and then, well, you’re hooked with that voice, especially after you reach the wickedly funny title story (the fourth).Lydia Davis: “Lucia Berlin’s stories are electric, they buzz and crackle as the live wires touch. And in response, the reader’s mind, too, beguiled, enraptured, comes alive, all synapses firing. This is the way we like to be, when we’re reading—using our brains, feeling our hearts beat.”And that’s precisely the feeling you get.Writing in The New York Times, Ruth Franklin said Berlin’s stories “are the kind a woman in a Tom Waits song might tell a man she’s just met during a long humid night spent drinking in a parking lot.”The comparisons are out there—Carver, Proust, Chekhov, Proulx. All legit. (Skip right to “Point of View” as Berlin invokes Chekhov and basically tells us how she uses “intricate detail” to make a character “believable.” This is a short story about writing; her secrets.)Berlin’s style is blunt, gritty, unflinching, non-flashy, earnest, detailed, matter-of-fact. There’s a medical undertow to the entire collection—dentists, abortionists, hospitals, nurses. Blood is a frequent topic along with other bodily fluids. Berlin’s writing is un-sanitized, too, but it’s frequently as straightforward as a friend with, well, a story.“I’ve worked in hospitals for years now and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that the sicker the patients are the less noise they make,” goes the first line of “Temps Perdu.” How easy and inviting is that?“It was dry at the airport, cars grinding in and out on the gravel,” says the narrator in “Electric Car, El Paso,” a funny four-page dollop. “Tumbleweeds caught in the fence. Asphalt, metal, a haze of dusty dancing atoms that reflected dazzling from the wings and windows of the airplanes. People in cars around us were eating sloppy things. Watermelons, pomegranates, bruised bananas.”The stories often feature people who try new things, step into other worlds, and stretch their boundaries. Her characters are not fodder for the fates, however. They make choices. No matter the narrator or main character, the senses are always on fire, taking in the world.In “Bluebonnets,” one of the few stories told in third person, a teacher named Maria heads off from Oakland to Texas to spend time with a writer whose work she had translated into Spanish. A fling of sorts; she’s not sure. The man, Dixon, stops on their drive out into the country and makes her wait while he gets a haircut. “The absence of noise was what was so evocative of her childhood, of another era. No sirens, no traffic, no radios. A horsefly buzzed against the window, snip of scissors, the rhythm of the two men’s voices, an electric fan with dirty ribbons flying rustled old magazines. The barber ignored her, not out of rudeness but from courtesy.”She’s a reporter (or memoirist) who takes stark, unsentimental moments and finds the telling image that reveals how her characters feel, what they’re thinking. Reading these stories, you get the feeling that Berlin never had her brain turned off or her eyes closed.  Berlin is utterly alive, despite all the poverty-stricken bleakness or alcoholism or death, and her characters are, too. They see things, hear things, and document their surroundings as they confront some terribly real scenario.In “Todo Luna, Todo Año,” a Spanish teacher named Eloise Gore takes her solo trip three years after the death of her husband. Eloise is about to wake up, in a very big way, but first she takes in her surroundings, feeling very much out of place.“She forced herself to relax, to enjoy langostinos broiled in garlic. Mariachis were strolling from table to table, passed hers by when they saw her frozen expression. Sabor a ti. The taste of you. Imagine an American song about how somebody tasted? Everything in Mexico tasted. Vivid garlic, cilantro, lime. The smells were vivid. Not the flowers, they didn’t smell at all. But the sea, the pleasant smell of decaying jungle. Rancid odor of the pigskin chairs, kerosene-waxed tiles, candles.”Later, in her room, Eloise works working on translating a poem. Berlin tumbles together her fine-tuning of the translation with all that is going on around her. And the two strands intertwine, exterior and interior.“In her room she looked at the poem again. Thus all life arrives / at the place of its quietude. No. And not life, anyway, the word is sangre, blood, all that pulsates and flows. The lamp was too dim, bugs clattered into the shade. As she shut off her light the music began again in the bar. Insistent thud of the bass. Her heart beat, was beating. Sangre.”Lucia Berlin stories pulsate and flow, yes, with 'sangre' and heart.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    A powerful collection of stories
  

*by E***R on Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 29, 2021*

Lucia Berlin, while apparently not all that well known in literary circles, has authored several powerful collections of short stories (most recently this volume and Evening in Paradise) as well as a memoir Welcome Home. During her emotionally packed life she was married three times, raised four children virtually alone, and lived in an assorted collection of places including Arizona, Mexico, Chile, New York and Colorado. She worked in a wide variety of jobs including office manager, medical assistant, cleaning lady, and university professor. She was plagued with scoliosis her whole life and was an alcoholic for much of it. Her husbands and partners often suffered with drug abuse. She was often forced to live a hand-to-mouth existence. Despite all this, she was a writer of remarkable sensitivity. Her stories often appear to be fictionalized versions of actual events in her life. And they are often stark and poignant renditions of things she lived through. I found that in this volume, after a slightly slow start, the stories became really gripping and intense and left this reader moved by the sensitivity and emotions depicted. Toward the end of her life, Lucia was invited to the University of Colorado to teach creative writing and was praised as an exceptional teacher. A fitting conclusion to a rather sensational life by a gifted writer.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    BRILLIANT! DON'T MISS READING LUCIA BERLIN! WOW!
  

*by M***E on Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 6, 2016*

I am sad it took me so long to get to Lucia Berlin, but am so thankful that I have read this outstanding, wildass, vibrant writer!!! DAMN! I picked it up and couldn't put it down. These stories have the same central characters throughout taken from four separate collections. I am in LOVE with the narrator of all of these! After her death her son wrote: "Ma wrote true stories, not necessarily autobiographical, but close enough for horseshoes."The stories are set in Mexico, New Mexico, New York, Arizona, Texas, and Colorado. Berlin had so many different jobs and lived in small towns and large cities and she's brings ALL to LIFE with her mastery of language and internal, external dialogue. Both hilarious and heartbreaking, she delves deep through her characters and takes us in as an astute outsider who sees the unjust world with humor and pathos. Here are some quotes, but the entire collection is quotable:"shutters as old as Herman Melville.""He began to pull the rest of his bottom teeth without a mirror. The sound was the sound of roots being ripped out, like trees being torn from winter ground.""I would lurch up to them and blurt out "My uncle has a glass eye." Or "I found a dead Kodiak bear with his face full of maggots.""Cleaning women do steal. Not the things the people we work for are so nervous about. It is the superfluity that finally gets to you. We don't want the change in the little ashtrays.....Today I stole a bottle of Spice Islands sesame seeds.""You'll feel, hell if the narrator thinks there is something in this dreary creature worth writing about there must be. I'll read on and see what happens. Nothing happens, actually. In fact the story isn't even written yet. What I hope to do is, by the use of intricate detail, to make this woman so believable you can't help but feel for her.""The day my father killed off my mother was the day he stopped knowing me.""I've never understood how so many barely literate people read the Bible so much. It's hard. In the same way it surprises me that uneducated seamstresses all over the world can figure out how to put in sleeves and zippers."I am enamored! I look forward to reading all of her collections! Get it!

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*Product available on Desertcart Romania*
*Store origin: RO*
*Last updated: 2026-02-16*