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Hello and welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club for the month of February 2016. I'm Katie Waldman, Words Correspondent at Slate,

and I'm joined in the DC studio today by Christina Katerucci, a staff writer for Double X.

Hey, Christina. Hey, Katie. Thanks for having me. Welcome to the audio book club. Also appearing on our

show for the first time, live from New York, is the movie and culture critic Mark Harris.

Hey, Mark. Hey, Katie. Hey, we are thrilled to have you both. So today we'll be diving into a big

orange tome of short stories by Master, Storyteller, an underrated genius, Lucia Berlin. This collection

is titled A Manual for Cleaning Women, and it gathers together

more than 40 of Berlin's quasi-autobiographical tales. This is not exactly a book that lends itself

to spoiler warnings, but you should still know that we will not hold back in discussing

plot twists where they appear. So if you prefer your reading experience absolutely unsullied

by commentary, you should pause this podcast, go read a manual for cleaning women, and then come back where we will be waiting with open arms or something.

Okay, enough for me. Mark, you were spotted on Twitter enthusing about Lucia Berlin.

So I was just wondering to start off, what drew you to her and what do you

think sets her apart from the many, many gifted short story writers out there?

Well, what drew me to her was all of the immense critical attention that she got during

2015. You know, hers was a name I had never heard before and suddenly I just read

review after review, not only saying that this was a great collection, but that she was

really a writer's writer, which intrigued me. And I think one reason I was enthusiastic about

it is that I have sort of a love-hate relationship with short story collections.

I'm more of a novel reader.

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