A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

From the publisher: "With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, short-story writer Lucia Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the Laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians. Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they'd ever overlooked her in the first place."