"Evenings in Paradise: Stories," by Lucia Berlin

Lucia Berlin’s posthumous collection of short stories, “A Manual for Cleaning Women” (2015) was a huge success both critically and popularly. I wrote about it here (2/20/16) with great admiration and enthusiasm. Now I have read an even more recent posthumous collection by the same author, “Evenings in Paradise” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), and am equally bowled over by the quality of the stories: the writing, the insights, the slices of real life, the fearlessness. These stories, like those in the earlier book, are largely drawn from the author’s own tumultuous and often very difficult life: her brilliance and talent were hampered at various times in her life by poverty, alcoholism, and failed marriages and relationships. She managed to overcome these obstacles and became a great writer and professor; in addition, she raised four children, mostly on her own. As I wrote about her earlier collection, her stories are bursting with life, vivid, gritty, and sublime. They take place in multiple settings and at various times in the usual main character’s (i.e., Berlin’s) life. I of course especially liked reading the stories set in Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco, “my” territory, but also liked and savored them all, whether set in Albuquerque, New York, or Europe, among other sites. Readers will admire the main character’s -- and the author’s -- courage, but also her joie de vivre. Highly recommended.