Lucia Berlin died in 2004 and this large selection of her
short stories did not appear until ten years later. What a shame she didn’t know how widely read and
appreciated her work would become through this collection. But the book itself benefits from access to
her complete works and the arrangement of the stories, which may or may not be
close to the order in which they were written, because the recurring characters
in many of them grow and develop almost like a memoir. The incidents are in large part taken from
her own colorful and difficult life, but really are literary fiction not
autobiography. Ranging from western
mining towns, to Mexico, Chile, the Bay Area, and New York City, they evoke the
places she lived as well as the experiences she had. She’s wonderfully observant of both the human
condition and the natural world. I loved
them. 415 pp.
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