With the recent publication of A Manual for Cleaning Women, and the sustained critical acclaim it has received, Berlin has finally been recognized as a master of the short story, allowing her work to reach the broad audience it deserves. These two collections capture distilled moments of crisis or epiphany, placing the protagonists in moments of stress or personal strain, and all told in an almost offhand, matter of fact voice. Weaving through the places she loved Chile, Mexico, the Southwest, and California each story delivers a poignant moment that lingers in the mind, not resolved, not decoded, but resonating, as questions of the human condition always do, in the heart of the reader.

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