I am glad to see that Lucia Berlin is finally receiving a fair amount of national recognition...I have a feeling that there are at least 500 writers from the last thirty or forty years, writers recently deceased, who never received acclaim or even a polite nod from the literary establishment, because of a modest output or because their work never filled any sort of "glamorous" niche.
Lucia Berlin wrote stories about nurses, housecleaners, alcoholics. Her stories have both clarity and passion. "I carried him down the hallway like King Kong"--one unforgettable line from a story about a nurse caring for a very small man, a jockey. Berlin's narrator describes how beautiful the man was, and you can feel the strangeness of the experience for the nurse, as well as her fascination. Her stories are also funny, as that sentence indicates.
A collection of her stories was just released, ten years after her death...highly recommended for anyone looking for finely crafted stories about ordinary people and their extraordinary insights.
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