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A Manual for Cleaning Women
- Selected Stories
- Narrated by: Thom Rivera, Dawn Harvey, Carol Monda, Hillary Huber, Bernadette Dunne, Kyla Garcia
- Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
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Publisher's Summary
"I have always had faith that the best writers will rise to the top, like cream, sooner or later, and will become exactly as well-known as they should be - their work talked about, quoted, taught, performed, filmed, set to music, anthologized. Perhaps, with the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves." - Lydia Davis, from the foreword
A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, 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.
Listeners will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they'd ever overlooked her in the first place.
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What listeners say about A Manual for Cleaning Women
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Performance
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Story
- Diane R.
- 03-31-16
The lives, struggles and small, precious victories of women you'll probably never know
These short vignettes of the daily routine, crises, and terrible dilemmas facing working women and their families are narrated beautifully. I listen exclusively to short stories an hour or so before bed, and this collection is my mainstay. I have never lived these lives, which are pulled mostly from the lower echelon of American society. I promise you will see our country differently through this author's skillful narrative and characters whom you feel you are living with in just the first few words.
8 people found this helpful
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- Sazafrass
- 03-02-16
Exquisite writing, lopsided performances
One of the narrators, whoever the woman is who reads "Grief" and others, has a voice not unlike a robot reading "talk to text." Her inflections are so alien and odd, I can barely stand to listen to her. If I speed it up to 1.25 it is slightly more bearable, but no less bizarre. The woman who reads "A manual for cleaning women" and others, does a rich, textured, feeling and gravelly performance. I find the disparity in these two voices jarring and ultimately I am just going to buy the book so that I can read it to myself. That being said, Berlin's writing is exquisite- she rights of harsh, beautiful, rough, dirty, gorgeous, sad, depressing, surreal situations and people- my heart feels like it is being torn open from beauty and grief listening to this work. I am so grateful that her work has come to me, and so sad I didn't find it sooner, that most of us didn't find it until after she was dead. Audible, seriously, consider re-recording this volume of stories, nixing the performances of the robot lady, who generally reads anything written in the third person.
20 people found this helpful
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- P. Ryan
- 08-09-16
Hard to get through
What did you like best about A Manual for Cleaning Women? What did you like least?
I think this would have been much more enjoyable reading instead of listening. The stories jump around too much and it's hard to tell if some of the short stories are connected. I like the way it was written, but again it would have been much more suiting to read it through, because I believe it takes patience, undivided attention and dedication to enjoy it as an audio book. It's more of a heady book.
What do you think your next listen will be?
Something a little more spicy, lively and inspiring.
Would you be willing to try another one of the narrators’s performances?
No, I found the main women a little monotonous. Her performance fell flat and didn't give good opportunity for funny or dramatic material.
Did A Manual for Cleaning Women inspire you to do anything?
Eh...not especially inspiring. Some really nice keepsake sayings and thoughts here and there, but not exceptionally provocative.
5 people found this helpful
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- Stephanie
- 07-04-16
A whole book of gritty true-life stories turned out to be a little too much
I stopped listening after one last story about some poor dogs and a porcupine and then a sledgehammer. The very long and glowing forward also grew tiring. I don't like to write negative reviews, and tbh the narrators did a pretty good job mostly, but I guess I can only take so much life-story telling from this point of view. I see enough of society's underbelly where I work, I don't need it on my down time, too.
11 people found this helpful
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- u'i
- 02-28-16
Wonderful!
Beautiful writing and fascinating heartfelt stories. I would have preferred a few seconds more between the stories instead of Audilble's unfortunate habit of running stories and chapters together. The readers were fabulous.
6 people found this helpful
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- MONIE
- 07-30-17
gloriously written
just marvelous I am in awe of her honesty and ability to create and maintain a mood she is a masterful storyteller!
2 people found this helpful
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- Dale
- 04-23-16
Short stories that work as a whole!
The writings clang together like pots you are putting away. You see scenes from a fascinating person's life. In time you begin to know her, her kids, her fun, her sorrows. It is a good read, and I usually don't like short stories because you leave the characters too quickly....not so with this writing. It is wonderful!
4 people found this helpful
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- A. Cohen
- 03-23-21
Good book. Lousy packaging.
OK fantastic stories. That’s the most important thing.
However I am perplexed to find that the multi billion dollar company behind the distribution of this audiobook is so understaffed that they are not able to provide a list of the NAMES OF THE INDIVIDUAL STORIES. Instead you get only this: chapter 1, chapter 2, Etc. Come on.
Perhaps this is the fault of the publisher? Either way, it shows no respect for the writer or the listener. Do better with your billions Amazon.
1 person found this helpful
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- Kennedy
- 04-10-17
Reads Like Nonfiction
Really wonderful, gritty, personal fiction that reads like nonfiction. I highly recommend this for MFA Creative Writing programs where this type of short story collection is highly emulatable.
1 person found this helpful
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- Another reader
- 09-26-16
A review from El Paso, TX
I stumble upon Lucia Berlin, not knowing her ties with Southwest and it has been a pleasure. She captured the joys and pathos of our region as only somebody who has felt it.
Read her work, you will find a calm resignation about what it is to live.
1 person found this helpful
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Story
Garrison Keillor's latest book is about the wedding of a girl named Dede Ingebretson, who comes home from California with a guy named Brent. Dede has made a fortune in veterinary aromatherapy; Brent bears a strong resemblance to a man wanted for extortion who's pictured on a poster in the town's post office. Then there's the memorial service for Dede's aunt Evelyn, who led a footloose and adventurous life after the death of her husband 17 years previously.
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Brillliant but not lighthearted
- By Shel on 10-01-07
By: Garrison Keillor
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Olive Kitteridge
- Fiction
- By: Elizabeth Strout
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 12 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse.
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It's a Short Story Collection
- By Kerr506 on 12-08-19
By: Elizabeth Strout
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules (Unabridged Selections)
- By: Edited by David Sedaris
- Narrated by: David Sedaris, Mary-Louise Parker, Cherry Jones
- Length: 2 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules is a collection of short stories, some classic, others impending, selected and introduced by David Sedaris.
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Beautiful Stories Great Voices
- By Christine Currie on 02-07-16
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Blessings
- By: Anna Quindlen
- Narrated by: Joan Allen
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Anna Quindlen, best selling author of A Short Guide to a Happy Life, returns with this "immensely appealing" novel. The secrets of the past, how they affect the decisions and lives of people in the present; what makes a person, a life, legitimate or illegitimate, and who decides; the unique resources people find in themselves and in a community - these are at the center of this story of love, redemption, and personal change.
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Nice Blessings
- By Susan on 03-19-08
By: Anna Quindlen
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Like Life
- Stories
- By: Lorrie Moore
- Narrated by: Jane Oppenheimer
- Length: 6 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In Like Life's eight exquisite stories, Lorrie Moore's characters stumble through their daily existence. These men and women, unsettled and adrift and often frightened, can't quite understand how they arrived at their present situations. Harry has been reworking a play for years in his apartment near Times Square in New York. Jane is biding her time at a cheese shop in a Midwest mall. Dennis, unhappily divorced, buries himself in self-help books about healthful food and healthy relationships.
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Bravo ! Just the read I needed...
- By Paul titus on 02-21-21
By: Lorrie Moore
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The Light Years
- A Memoir
- By: Chris Rush
- Narrated by: Victor Lodato
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Chris Rush was born into a prosperous, fiercely Roman Catholic New Jersey family. But underneath the gleaming mid-century house, the flawless hostess mom, and the thriving businessman dad ran an unspoken tension that, amid the upheaval of the late 1960s, was destined to fracture their precarious facade. His older sister, Donna, introduces him to the charismatic Valentine, who places a tab of acid on 12-year-old Rush’s tongue, proclaiming: “This is sacrament. You are one of us now.”
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Well..
- By Elizabeth on 05-01-19
By: Chris Rush
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Wobegon Boy
- By: Garrison Keillor
- Narrated by: Garrison Keillor
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Abridged
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From the millions of listeners who follow the tales of Lake Wobegon and A Prairie Home Companion every Saturday night on public radio, and for fans of Garrison Keillor's literary take on life in our times, this audiobook will be most welcome.
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This Book Makes you Think
- By Lynda on 02-06-05
By: Garrison Keillor
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All Things Cease to Appear
- A Novel
- By: Elizabeth Brundage
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 14 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Late one winter afternoon in upstate New York, George Clare comes home to find his wife killed and their three-year-old daughter alone - for how many hours? - in her room across the hall. He had recently begrudgingly taken a position at a nearby private college (far too expensive for local kids to attend) teaching art history and moved his family into a tight-knit, impoverished town that has lately been discovered by wealthy outsiders in search of a rural idyll.
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misleading reviews
- By Alena on 10-08-17
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Sullivan's Island
- A Lowcountry Tale
- By: Dorothea Benton Frank
- Narrated by: Joyce Bean
- Length: 5 hrs and 53 mins
- Abridged
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Born and raised in idyllic Sullivan's Island, Susan Hayes navigated through her turbulent childhood with humor, spunk, and characteristic Southern sass. But years later, she is a conflicted woman with an unfaithful husband, a sometimes resentful teenage daughter, and a heart that aches with painful, poignant memories. And as Susan faces her uncertain future, she realizes that she must go back to her past. To the beachfront house where her sister welcomes her with open arms.
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Wish there were more
- By Amy on 05-19-16