"There is little if any diminishment in quality or intensity (from A Manual for Cleaning Women) . . . Berlin probably deserved a Pulitzer Prize." —Dwight Garner, The New York TimesNamed a Fall Read by Buzzfeed, ELLE, TIME, Nylon, The Boston Globe, Vulture, Newsday, HuffPost, Bustle, The Millions, BUST, Reinfery29, Fast Company and MyDomaine A collection of previously uncompiled stories from the short-story master and literary sensation Lucia BerlinIn 2015, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published A Manual for Cleaning Women, a posthumous story collection by a relatively unknown writer, to wild, widespread acclaim. It was a New York Times bestseller; the paper's Book Review named it one of the Ten Best Books of 2015; and NPR, Time, Entertainment Weekly, The Guardian, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and other...

"As the case with her fiction, Berlin's pieces here are as faceted as the brightest diamond." —Kristin Iversen, NYLONNamed a Fall Read by Buzzfeed, Vulture, Newsday and HuffPostA compilation of sketches, photographs, and letters, Welcome Home is an essential nonfiction companion to the stories by Lucia BerlinBefore Lucia Berlin died, she was working on a book of previously unpublished autobiographical sketches called Welcome Home. The work consisted of more than twenty chapters that started in 1936 in Alaska and ended (prematurely) in 1966 in southern Mexico. In our publication of Welcome Home, her son Jeff Berlin is filling in the gaps with photos and letters from her eventful, romantic, and tragic life. From Alaska to Argentina, Kentucky to Mexico, New York City to Chile, Berlin's world was wide. And the writing here is, as we've come to expect, dazzling. She...

Set mainly in Los Angeles, Lucia Berlin's gritty working-class stories bridge the gap between the Americas—rich and poor, North and South, Anglo and Hispanic. While her style has been compared to Raymond Carver's, and her dream- and drink-addicted characters to Richard Yates', her fictional territory and fatalistic humor are hers alone.

In 1981, John Martin published Lucia Berlin's first book of stories, and in 1993 her last. With the recent publication of A Manual for Cleaning Women, and the sustained critical acclaim it has received, Berlin has finally been recognized as a master of the short story, allowing her work to reach the broad audience it deserves. These two collections capture distilled moments of crisis or epiphany, placing the protagonists in moments of stress or personal strain, and all told in an almost offhand, matter of fact voice. Weaving through the places she loved—Chile, Mexico, the Southwest, and California—each story delivers a poignant moment that lingers in the mind, not resolved, not decoded, but resonating, as questions of the human condition always do, in the heart of the reader.