Evening in Paradise is an essential piece of Berlin’s oeuvre, a jewel-box follow-up for new and old fans. From Texas to Chile, Mexico to New York City, Berlin finds beauty in the darkest places and darkness in the seemingly pristine. Evening in Paradise is a careful selection from Berlin’s remaining stories-twenty-two gems that showcase the gritty glamour that made readers fall in love with her. The book’s author, Lucia Berlin, earned comparisons to Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, Alice Munro, and Anton Chekhov. 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 outlets gave the book rave reviews. In 2015, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published A Manual for Cleaning Women, a posthumous story collection by a relatively unknown writer, to wild, widespread acclaim. Berlin’s writing has the advantage of approaching these themes from a time less exhausting than the present, and she also has a gaze tender and precise enough to make her characters feel like people and not archetypes or sermons in disguise.Named a Fall Read by Buzzfeed, The Boston Globe, Vulture, Newsday, HuffPost and The MillionsĪ collection of previously uncompiled stories from the short-story master and literary sensation Lucia Berlin Much of the world that Berlin describes is harrowing for women, and yet her stories.cheerfully refuse to erase either the women or the brutality that deranges them. More often than not, the narration expresses what its isolated female protagonist cannot. The character may feel alone, but the story refutes her fear: Someone is seeing her. These stories have the austerity of a steely mental exercise, Berlin scrutinizing herself through the kind or not-so-kind eyes of others, but they also offer reassurance. Others have the sweep and inner architecture of perfect stand-alones. Evening in Paradise is even more fragmented than its predecessor : Several of the pieces-including the title story-might most truthfully be described as sketches for stories, or brilliantly drawn scenes from a larger, coherent work that doesn’t exist. It’s no accident that many critics looking for Berlin’s peers compare her primarily to male authors (Hemingway, Raymond Carver), though the comparisons rarely do justice to her humor or her quirky, lavish prose style.
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