![]() ![]() Many explore relationships between men and women with a dry wit and sharp insight. Opening in segregated Texas in 1943 with the bright childhood memories of ‘The Musical Vanity Boxes’, these are vivid stories which glow with evocative descriptive language, often set against gorgeous backdrops, from the Chilean countryside to the Mexican coastline and the Arizonan desert. Comprising twenty-two stories, this new collection lacks the more detailed biographical notes included in A Manual for Cleaning Women, perhaps because there’s a memoir due to be published alongside it, but it’s clear that it also draws on her own life and what a rackety life it was: several marriages, four children and alcoholism followed a peripatetic childhood spent in mining towns with a brief glamorous teenage period in Chile. Given that she died in 2004, I’d assumed that was it and so was delighted when Evening in Paradise turned up. There’d been others along the way but it was Berlin’s collection that sealed the deal. ![]() ![]() I owe my short story conversion largely to Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women. ![]()
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