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Lucia Berlin
Lucia Brown Berlin (November 12, 1936 – November 12, 2004) was an American short story writer. She had a small, devoted following, but did not reach a mass audience during her lifetime. She rose to sudden literary fame in 2015, eleven years after her death, with the publication of a volume of her selected stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women.
Berlin was born in Juneau, Alaska, and spent her childhood on the move, following her father's career as a mining engineer. The family lived in mining camps in Idaho, Montana, Arizona, El Paso, Texas and Chile, where Lucia spent most of her youth. As an adult, she lived in New Mexico, Mexico, New York City, Northern and Southern California, and Colorado.
Berlin began publishing relatively late in life, under the encouragement and sometimes tutelage of poet Ed Dorn. Her first small collection, Angels Laundromat, was published in 1981, but her published stories were written as early as 1960. She published seventy-six stories in her lifetime. Several of her stories appeared in magazines such as The Atlantic and Saul Bellow's The Noble Savage. Berlin published six collections of short stories, but most of her work can be found in three later volumes from Black Sparrow Books: Homesick: New and Selected Stories (1990), So Long: Stories 1987-92 (1993) and Where I Live Now: Stories 1993-98 (1999).
Berlin was never a bestseller during her lifetime, but was widely influential within the literary community.[citation needed] She has been compared to Raymond Carver and Richard Yates.[citation needed] Her one-page story "My Jockey," consisting of five paragraphs, won the Jack London Short Prize for 1985. Berlin also won an American Book Award in 1991 for Homesick, and was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
In 2015, a compendium of her short story work was released under the title, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Short Stories. It debuted at #18 on the New York Times bestseller list its first week, and rose to #15 on the regular list the following week. The collection was ineligible for most of the year-end awards (either because she was deceased, or it was recollected material), but was named to a large number of year-end lists, including the New York Times Book Reviews "10 Best Books of 2015." It debuted at #14 on the ABA's Indie bestseller list and #5 on the LA Times' list. It was also a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. In 2024, it was ranked #79 of the 100 Best Books of the 21st century by the New York Times. Within a few weeks it had outsold all of Berlin's previous books combined.
Throughout her life, Berlin earned a living doing working class jobs, among them a position as a cleaning woman and one as a telephone receptionist.
Up through the early 1990s, Berlin taught creative writing in a number of venues, including the San Francisco County Jail and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. She also took oral histories from elderly patients at Mt. Zion Hospital.
She was interested in artist's books and the publishing process. Working with Poltroon Press, she designed some of her own books and typset them. She would revise them as she set the print. She also produced chapbooks.
Lucia Berlin
Lucia Brown Berlin (November 12, 1936 – November 12, 2004) was an American short story writer. She had a small, devoted following, but did not reach a mass audience during her lifetime. She rose to sudden literary fame in 2015, eleven years after her death, with the publication of a volume of her selected stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women.
Berlin was born in Juneau, Alaska, and spent her childhood on the move, following her father's career as a mining engineer. The family lived in mining camps in Idaho, Montana, Arizona, El Paso, Texas and Chile, where Lucia spent most of her youth. As an adult, she lived in New Mexico, Mexico, New York City, Northern and Southern California, and Colorado.
Berlin began publishing relatively late in life, under the encouragement and sometimes tutelage of poet Ed Dorn. Her first small collection, Angels Laundromat, was published in 1981, but her published stories were written as early as 1960. She published seventy-six stories in her lifetime. Several of her stories appeared in magazines such as The Atlantic and Saul Bellow's The Noble Savage. Berlin published six collections of short stories, but most of her work can be found in three later volumes from Black Sparrow Books: Homesick: New and Selected Stories (1990), So Long: Stories 1987-92 (1993) and Where I Live Now: Stories 1993-98 (1999).
Berlin was never a bestseller during her lifetime, but was widely influential within the literary community.[citation needed] She has been compared to Raymond Carver and Richard Yates.[citation needed] Her one-page story "My Jockey," consisting of five paragraphs, won the Jack London Short Prize for 1985. Berlin also won an American Book Award in 1991 for Homesick, and was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
In 2015, a compendium of her short story work was released under the title, A Manual for Cleaning Women: Short Stories. It debuted at #18 on the New York Times bestseller list its first week, and rose to #15 on the regular list the following week. The collection was ineligible for most of the year-end awards (either because she was deceased, or it was recollected material), but was named to a large number of year-end lists, including the New York Times Book Reviews "10 Best Books of 2015." It debuted at #14 on the ABA's Indie bestseller list and #5 on the LA Times' list. It was also a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. In 2024, it was ranked #79 of the 100 Best Books of the 21st century by the New York Times. Within a few weeks it had outsold all of Berlin's previous books combined.
Throughout her life, Berlin earned a living doing working class jobs, among them a position as a cleaning woman and one as a telephone receptionist.
Up through the early 1990s, Berlin taught creative writing in a number of venues, including the San Francisco County Jail and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. She also took oral histories from elderly patients at Mt. Zion Hospital.
She was interested in artist's books and the publishing process. Working with Poltroon Press, she designed some of her own books and typset them. She would revise them as she set the print. She also produced chapbooks.