![]() ![]() Both “The Musical Vanity Boxes” and “Sometimes in the Summer” are told by a first-person narrator named “Lucia” who details the small adventures of her childhood early 1940s in El Paso, Texas. The first stories in the collection feel sharply autobiographical. Lucia said this didn’t matter: the story is the thing. Our family stories and memories have been slowly reshaped, embellished and edited to the extent that I’m not sure what really happened all the time. Ma wrote true stories not necessarily autobiographical, but close enough for horseshoes. As Berlin’s eldest son Mark Berlin noted in a 2005 essay on his mother (which serves as an introduction to Evening in Paradise), ![]() Evening in Paradise shows an artist shaping the events of her life, big and small, wild and tragic, sharp and dull, into an impressionistic and urgent patchwork of tales that add up to a fictional memoir of sorts. These stories teem with electric energy-even when their immediate subject matters might seem banal on the surface. Like the excellent compendium A Manual for Cleaning Women which preceded it, Evening in Paradise is crammed with life. Most of the stories center around a semi-autobiographical version of Berlin herself. The book collects twenty-two stories originally published between 19. ![]() Evening in Paradise is the second posthumously-published collection of short stories by the American writer Lucia Berlin. ![]()
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