She lived in so many places she was sometimes mistaken for being from them. She counted among her best friends jazz musicians, the Black Mountain poets, the mother of the Black Panther Huey P. She once said she believed that Jane Austen’s world “was as hard as some alcoholic in a motel room in a Raymond Carver story.” She had lived high and low, in Alaska, Montana, Texas, Chile, New Mexico, New York City, Mexico, California, Colorado, looking out onto the northern lights, in tar-paper cabins and in mining camps and by walls of pink oleander and above factories that reeked of ham. In Lucia Berlin years, sixty-eight must somehow be more than what it is for most human beings, for in just short of seven decades she filled her life with the kind of restless, electric fervor that ricochets through her short stories.īerlin forged her own idea of what a short story could be, yet she “seemed to have read everything, and could talk about it with humor and passion,” wrote her friend Michael Wolfe, who edited her 1984 collection Phantom Pain. Lucia Berlin was born in Juneau, Alaska in 1936 and died in 2004 on her own birthday at the age of sixty-eight, a full-circle distinction she shares with William Shakespeare and Merle Haggard. Like this from “The Musical Vanity Boxes,” as Raúl, a father from Juarez, leads young “Lucha” and her Syrian best friend Hope back over the border to El Paso: “Gentle, like the pull of a dowser’s branch, drawing our bony bodies into the pachuco beat of his walk, so light, slow, swinging.”īerlin’s first posthumous collected stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women (2015), showcased her extraordinary and underappreciated talent and her fantastic range the second, Evening in Paradise, recently published alongside a companion volume of her memoir and letters, presumes to show us this and more: her life. Dunes, with waves and patterns like in postcards from the Painted Desert.” Rather than create pauses, her descriptions ignite the story, keep it in motion. Three- or four-foot sand dunes in every room.

Torn and rusted venetian blinds rattling in the wind. Take this succession from the story “Strays,” set in a desolate rehab facility outside Albuquerque: “Fallen-down barracks. Less drag, high velocity the story propels forward. Her deliberate abbreviations slipstream off one another. There are masters of the paragraph and masters of the sentence Lucia Berlin is the master of the fragment. PHOTO: BUDDY BERLIN/LITERARY ESTATE OF LUCIA BERLIN

Evening in paradise lucia berlin