18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 1977, 1983, 1984, 1988, 1990, 1993, 1999 by Lucia Berlin
Copyright © 2015 by the Estate of Lucia Berlin
Foreword copyright © 2015 by Lydia Davis
Introduction copyright © 2015 by Stephen Emerson
All rights reserved
First edition, 2015
Most of these stories have previously appeared in the collections Angels Laundromat (Turtle Island, 1981), Phantom Pain (Tombouctou, 1984), Safe & Sound (Poltroon, 1988); Homesick (Black Sparrow Press, 1991); So Long (Black Sparrow Press, 1993), and Where I Live Now (Black Sparrow Press, 1999). Stories from So Long and Where I Live Now are reprinted by permission of David R. Godine. The story “B.F. and Me” appeared, in slightly different form, in The Paris Review.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berlin, Lucia.
[Short stories. Selections]
A manual for cleaning women: selected stories / Lucia Berlin; edited by Stephen Emerson. — First edition.
ISBN 978-0-374-20239-2 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-374-71286-0 (e-book)
I. Emerson, Stephen, editor. II. Title.
PS3552.E72485 A6 2015
813'.54—dc23
2014047119
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* In Lucia’s prose, punctuation is often unorthodox and sometimes inconsistent. Speed is one of the reasons. She abhors the comma that results in a pause that would not be heard in speech, or that produces an undesired slowing of any kind. In other cases, the eschewal of a comma will result in a certain hectic quality that promotes momentum. For the most part, we have avoided sanitizing her punctuation. The same goes for a few grammatical quirks rooted in vernacular and a characteristic hurry-up shorthand.