A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

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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.

Part of the vibrancy of Lucia Berlin’s prose is in the pacing — sometimes fluent and calm, balanced, ambling and easy; and sometimes staccato, notational, speedy. Part of it is in her specific naming of things: Piggly Wiggly (a supermarket), Beenie-Weenie Wonder (a strange culinary creation), Big Mama panty hose (a way to tell us how large the narrator is). It is in the dialogue. What is that exclamation? “Jesus wept.” “Well, I’m blamed!” The characterization: The boss of the switchboard operators says she can tell when it’s close to quitting time by the behavior of Thelma: “Your wig gets crooked and you start talking dirty.”

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