I had not heard of Lucia Berlin's work until the recent resurgence of popularity following the publication of A Manual for Cleaning Women in 2015, and it is so welcome! Her stories are biting and unsettling, but also refreshing. This collection has 22 stories, and none felt like filler. I would recommend this collection not only to lovers of short stories but also to anyone just looking for a good read. We discuss Lucia Berlin on The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast, and we will likely be covering some more of her stories in the future.

I really enjoyed this one! All of the stories were great. Captivating. I loved them just as much as I loved the stories from the first collection. All of the character interactions were filled with such an aching intimacy that you don’t often get in other books

I had high hopes for this but it fell a bit flat for me. I wanted to love the story stories but they continued to feel disjointed.

Her best are collected in Manual, but Lucia Berlin is always worth reading. Hopefully, more Lucia is still out there waiting to be anthologized.

Evening in Paradise is a short story collection that takes readers throughout the Southwest and Mexico, providing characters that are flawed and frustrated and ready to tell a story. While the idea that this author is getting more recognition posthumously than she did alive is a greater part of the overall appeal of her work, it still stands on its own as a solid body of work. And since this seems to be a spillover book from what was left out of the previous collection, that will be the book that I explore next.

I wasn't familiar with Lucia Berlin's work before; and while I can understand why some people like it so much, for me the stories are just ok,. She does a good job of making the characters and the setting realistic but there's a lingering sadness to them that makes it hard for me to enjoy them. She's an undeniably talented writer, though, and I'm sorry she didn't live long enough to add more to her body of work.

I’m sure the problem is all mine, but I didn’t enjoy this. I think I’m just not a fan of short stories. I need more than a few pages to connect with characters and their plight. Much of this just seemed to ramble for me.

I wasn’t blown away by A Manual for Cleaning Women—in fact, I couldn’t get into the stories much at all. Despite that, I decided to give Lucia Berlin the benefit of the doubt, and a second chance, because of how widely loved her work seems to be.

While I did like Evening in Paradise more than A Manual for Cleaning Women, I still didn’t love it. Her witty and both hopeful and hopeless characters are offset by a conventional, slightly dry and rambling style that didn’t exactly turn me away, but didn’t drag me in, either. Characters, themes, and settings recurred so often that I struggled to remember if any given character was one that had already been introduced, or was actually a brand-new person in the same situation but with a different name. Overall, this was an uneven story collection—much of the book didn’t hold my interest, but every now and then there were phrases and lines that were just pure magic.

A beautiful collection of short stories which seems to weave the tapestry of Berlin's life and experiences. Well written and a pleasure to read.

This collection from Lucia Berlin is just as fabulous as her previous book, A Manuel for Cleaning Women. Following the stories of a thinly veiled look at her own life, we follow the stories of poverty, addiction, death and everything in between.

There is a reason that Lucia Berlin's writing is so celebrated. The talent that lived inside of her was so rare and only because of her friends and family that we all know her now.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

This fall I planned to catch up with 21st-century fiction, but  I quickly hit a reality check: (a) I prefer classics, and (b) only a few new books are worth reading.

Take Lucia Berlin (1936-2004).  I adore Berlin’s fiction but of course it was written in the 20th century.  Her witty, buoyant, autobiographical short stories  were out-of-print  until Farrar Straus Giroux published  "A Manual for Cleaning Women" in 2015.  And now FSG has published another superb collection, "Evening in Paradise:  More Stories."

Berlin is noted for her dark humor and sharp observations of down-and-out middle-class women. Many of the stories portray witty, smart heroines who share Berlin’s history.  She herself struggled with alcoholism and was in and out of rehab programs.   After marrying  a sculptor and then a musician, she raised four sons on her own and worked  as a cleaning woman, hospital clerk, high school teacher, college writing teacher, and physician’s assistant.

In one of my favorite stories, “The Wives,” Laura and Decca have little in common, except for being the alcoholic ex-wives of Max.  When they get together for drinks one night–and Decca is so drunk she can’t even remember inviting Laura over–they humorously mourn the fact that Max is about to marry either a car hop or a Clinique salesgirl, depending on which you believe.  The dialogue is so sharp and witty Dorothy Parker could have written it.   A brilliant and funny story, also terribly sad.

In”Noel, 1974,” Maggie, a teacher, has an unwanted guest for Christmas, Aunt Zelda, who tries desperately to fit in by saying “Far out” all the time.    The house is already crowded with Maggie’s four sons, one sleeping in the garage, their 17-year-old pothead friend, Jesse, in a sleeping bag in the living room, and Maggie gives her room to Zelda.  Over the holiday, they do normal family things:  they attend Maggie’s son’s school Christmas pageant, quarrel over decorating the tree, and have a huge, chaotic dinner.  And then Aunt Zelda becomes frantic when she learns her daughter Mabel is gay.  These family scenes are right out of a comic movie, but Maggie’s exhaustion takes her in an  unexpectedly dark direction.  (There is a similar story in A Manual for Cleaning Women.)

In “My Life Is an Open Book,” Claire Bellamy teaches Spanish at the university and lives happily but chaotically with her sons in a farmhouse.  When she gets involved with 19-year-old Mike Casey, a drug-using guitar player, a neighbor starts to gossip.  After they break up, oblivious of the neighbor’s gossip, he babysits for her sons so she can go to a party.  While she is out, the youngest son disappears. But let me reassure you:  life is hard for Claire, but nothing terrible happens.

The title story, “Evening in Paradise,” is not my favorite, but it has its points:  The Night of the Iguana is being filmed in Mexico, and the bartender observes Liz Taylor, Richard Burton (not drinking at the time), Ava Gardner, and various tourists and male prostitutes drinking nightly at the hotel.  Much of this is very witty, but I am not a movie buff.

Lucia Berlin is a great American writer!  Astonishing her work was lost for so long.

Evening in Paradise is a feast of exquisite, masterful, haunting stories. What a shame we won't be hearing more from Lucia Berlin.

I may be in the minority, though I did not enjoy 85% of this collection. Highly atmospheric rather than plot or character driven, a style I'm unused to in short fiction. i looked forward to this book based on the hype of "Cleaning Woman," having not yet read, so it may or may not be fair or accurate to say that this seems scraped together to compile another posthumous collection without the benefit of an editing process. I'll still read "Cleaning Woman," though to be honest, not quite as excited to after reading "Evening in Paradise." I enjoy a fair amount of short fiction, though unsure Berlin's writing style particularly works for me. I found many of the stories slow to get to the point, with extraneous character, and while I realize these shorts are semi-autobiographical, found it irritating that the same names were used in different stories though seemingly no connection? A lot of the endings seemed abrupt and unfinished, again leading me to wonder if an editor may have provided some counsel on this. I missed much of the humor that other reviews mentioned and found myself skimming far more than usual. However, the most positive standouts were "Noel 1974" and "My Brother's Keeper" - both engrossing, entertaining pieces that resonated with me far more than most other. Nevertheless, I appreciated a preview copy by NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

I read A Manual for Cleaning Women in February 2016. I remember feeling completely immersed in it, and thinking it lived up to the significant hype it received upon publication. I was less enthralled by this collection, but that may have been circumstantial (I read it while traveling). Although the stories are short - some extremely so - they would benefit from a more sustained quality of attention than I gave them.

I picked up this collection because I enjoyed A Manual for Cleaning Women. Because Welcome Home, Berlin’s (sort of) memoir was touted as a companion, I picked it up as well. Based on the information in Welcome Home, the stories in Evening in Paradise seem extremely auto-biographical. And, also apparat to be chronological. But this presentation makes these stories less, rather than more, appealing to me. These felt more like reminiscences than honed short fiction writing.

Evening in Paradise is another wonderful short story collection from the late Lucia Berlin, author of the best-selling Manual for Cleaning Ladies.

Berlin's style is a comforting shorthand, a snapshot of life. She writes about domestic life, addiction, single motherhood, and somehow managed to make grief beautiful and death majestically quiet.

I drank in rather than read her words, like a hungry child in a pool of fresh water. I would recommend this collection to anyone who enjoys short stories or who enjoyed her most recently published collection.

My heartfelt thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for a free review copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

'Missed moments. One word, one gesture, can change your entire life, can break everything or make it whole.'

I have been wanting to read A Manual for Cleaning Women for a long time, having read glowing reviews so when I saw this one up for grabs I tucked in and wasn’t disappointed. Reading that many stories were based on her real life made them all the more satisfying. I was tickled by Tiny on the roof in the story Noel. Texas.1956. Spending her time overhearing her family, not quite feeling the Christmas spirit for her relatives, the very ones she did her best to escape, I couldn’t help but picture it all in my head. Then the generous toy delivery by airplane that goes all wrong and all I can think is, “life, isn’t that just the way things always are?”

Drug addiction that is both haunting and common in love, family haunts much of the collection. Laughing that two women give a man both the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ years of their lives, coming together in misery and yet somehow stronger women, wiser women for it all. How can a man who is a complete addict be the sort that all those who follow cannot measure up to? Life is mystery! One husband’s drug habit that takes a shocking violent turn for the wife who has no choice but to take care of things, cover something up and yet the next day is just another ordinary collection of days to come. Somehow these stories are both terribly sad, shocking and funny. It echoes many lives, there is one story where a little boy goes missing and it reminded me of something my own son did when he was with my mother and aunt. It doesn’t always work when authors play with the ‘truth’ of their own lives, creating fiction out of fact, but in the end everything we knew, experienced, are just stories with a million perspectives. If you think about it, no one ever tells them same story anyway, and that makes us all fascinating in what we chose to remember. That makes some people uncomfortable, the fluidity of truth but it’s necessary for fiction, I think.

I love reading stories about youth too, as we grow older we forget the bonds we shared with others. How fierce we were about loyalty and friendship. ‘When we got off the bus at the plaza, Hope repeated that she’d kill me if I ever spoke to Sammy again. “Never. Want blood?” We were always cutting our wrists and sealing promises.’ It could be the 1940s, the 1970s… human nature doesn’t change that much really. People fall in and out of love, grow and weed out friendships, raise children beautifully and terribly and the world spins on…

In each person there are many lives all full of beginnings and endings, tracks jumped when marriages dissipate or children are born. I loved The Adobe House With A Tin Roof because of the characters, nothing wild has to happen, it’s a quiet story but the plants, all the plants and her rowdy neighbor whom Maya both hates and adores (even if she doesn’t know it) made me feel I was there. One that stayed with me, Our Brother’s Keeper not just for the death of Sarah but more due to the flaw that so many women (especially those old enough to know better) chose to forgive because we sometimes want so badly for everything to just be okay. When it’s good, it’s good, right? Shouldn’t that be enough? Well, no… We may get bitter with age, because of what life does to us but deep down there is still that longing of a young girl’s heart.

I can’t compare her prior work, her audience was small while she was alive and has since grown after her death. Lucia Berlin was born in November of 1936 in Juneau, Alaska and died in 2005. Evening in Paradise is a follow-up collection of her remaining stories, and I genuinely enjoyed them all. Maybe my pleasure is in part my being a fellow November baby, always a little dark humored, easily finding things to laugh about even in the roughest of life’s moments, I can relate. Fitting that the stories will be released in November.

Publication Date: November 6, 2018

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Lucia Berlin’s short story collection “A Manual for Cleaning Women”, published posthumously in 2015, caused quite a stir and turned the author into a worldwide literary sensation. “Evening in Paradise” is the follow-up and offers 22 more stories that often refer to Berlin’s real life: We meet literary doppelgängers of her, her parents, her four kids and her three ex-husbands, and among the recurring themes are alcohol and heroin addiction, relationships gone sour, poverty and death. While this might not sound like particularly funny material, it nevertheless is – Berlin’s weapon against life’s hardships is her sense of humor, so we read sentences like:

”It would have been in poor taste for me to tell the girls at school just how many unbelievably handsome men had been at that funeral. I did anyway.” or

”Acceptance is faith, Henry Miller said. I could strangle him, too.”

It is this outlook on life, the particular way the characters in the stories deal with their obstacles that makes reading Lucia Berlin so special: The author’s humor and keen ability to capture the essence of a situation let the texts vibrate and flicker, and the effect is sometimes cathartic and sometimes shocking.

The stories are put together in roughly chronological order when you consider the themes discussed and how they relate to Berlin’s real life: She was born in 1936, her father worked in the mining industry and the family moved around a lot. When he went to war in 1941, the rest of the family stayed in El Paso with the grandparents – which is where the first story of the collection takes place. Then we follow Berlin’s fictional self to Chile, where she lived as a teenager, we encounter her alcoholic mother and later her artist husbands, one of them a heroin addict. Some names are changing, some do remain the same, but the main themes are present throughout the whole book.

Not all of the stories did convince me entirely, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading this collection and I wish the author would have been able to enjoy this degree of success during her lifetime.

I didn't not like these stories as much as her first collection. They were both published after her death and these just seemed like they were trying to dig up anything to publish and make a buck. It was clear these were more like first drafts or stories she didn't care to have published. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

Three years ago, I was blown away by A Manual for Cleaning Women, a compilation of stories by Lucia Berlin, gathered by her publishers and friends ten years after her death. I mentioned at the time that I felt a short story collection in which every story is good presents a challenge to a reader that novels do not. Each immersive piece requires more of an effort, whereas once under the spell of a novel, a reader can have a smoother experience.

Thus, I was thrilled to be offered an early copy of these additional stories, and found them to be every bit as compelling as those in the first collection. In addition, given the skeletal outline of Berlin's life, it is possible to see these as forming a very loose autobiography. There are no dates at least on the galleys, but no matter in which order they were written, as printed, they seem to advance more or less chronologically. Each features a central female figure who becomes a student in Chile, a young woman on her way to University of New Mexico, young wife and mother and the three husbands, then later as a single parent to her sons, and beyond. Many are told in first person, but some are in third, and in at least one case, multiple first person in the same story. The names of these protagonists are all different, but male characters sometimes carry the same name from story to story. When "Cleaning Women" came out, her publisher said he felt that "her time had finally come," that she hadn't received the recognition she deserved while alive because she was ahead of her time. That gives me pause -- good writing has always been acknowledged, and it's a shame she wasn't here to enjoy the accolades she deservedly if belatedly is receiving.

Thanks to FSG for this early chance to read and review this outstanding collection.