LE PORTRAIT MAGAZINE MARCH-SEPTEMBER ISSUE | Page 3

ELECTRIC LITERATURE’S BEST SHORT STORY
COLLECTIONS OF 2015

A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
The unfathomable uniqueness of Berlin’s style—her voice, in
particular—is evident in the adjectives being thrown around. Recent
pieces on Berlin and reviews of A Manual for Cleaning Women have
described her work as joyful, careworn, dark, bright, funny, sad, vivid,
droll, sincere, bawdy, offbeat, fierce, gritty, unfailingly feminine,
wickedly wise, emotionally raw, and (my favorite) spiky. […] This was
a brilliant woman. Her work transcends funny and shows us the absurd.
She doesn’t let her characters hide behind artifice or sensationalism or
substances, as much as they might like to. Reading these stories, you get
the sense that this is what she wanted for herself: to let go of the bullshit.
As a result, the transformation she provides is visceral and startling: We
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