By the New York Times- bestselling author of Evening in Paradise, poignant, personal short stories for fans of Grace Paley, Annie Proulx, and Alice Munro. In 1990, Black Sparrow Press published Lucia Berlin's first full-length collection of stories and remained her publisher until her passing in 2004. 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. This collection captures 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.