Welcome Home by Lucia Berlin

Welcome Home by Lucia Berlin

"As the case with her fiction, Berlin's pieces here are as faceted as the brightest diamond." --Kristin Iversen, NYLON

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE. Named a Fall Read by Buzzfeed, Vulture, Newsday and HuffPost

A compilation of sketches, photographs, and letters, Welcome Home is an essential nonfiction companion to the stories by Lucia Berlin

Before Lucia Berlin died, she was working on a book of previously unpublished autobiographical sketches called Welcome Home. The work consisted of more than twenty chapters that started in 1936 in Alaska and ended (prematurely) in 1966 in southern Mexico. In our publication of Welcome Home, her son Jeff Berlin is filling in the gaps with photos and letters from her eventful, romantic, and tragic life.

From Alaska to Argentina, Kentucky to Mexico, New York City to Chile, Berlin's world was wide. And the writing here is, as we've come to expect, dazzling. She describes the places she lived and the people she knew with all the style and wit and heart and humor that readers fell in love with in her stories. Combined with letters from and photos of friends and lovers, Welcome Home is an essential nonfiction companion to A Manual for Cleaning Women and Evening in Paradise.

Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Lucia Berlin (1936-2004) produced outstanding but infrequent work. Her stories are inspired by her early years in numerous Western mining towns, her glamorous adolescent years in Santiago, Chile, three failed marriages, a lifetime alcoholism problem, her years in Berkeley, New Mexico, and Mexico City, and the various professions she later did to support her writing and her four boys. During the 1990s, she was sober and writing regularly that she accepted a visiting writer's position at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she was quickly promoted to associate professor. She moved to Southern California in 2001 because her health was failing and she wanted to be closer to her boys.