Welcome home

Torn from a tender woman, of Hellenic beauty, this volume combines unpublished stories, memories, and autobiographical fragments. 

Lucia Berlin lets down all her guards. She writes about her wandering childhood, between mining towns and border cities. About the men she loved (and lost), the children she raised, the jobs she hated, the alcoholism that consumed her, and the writing that saved her.

Almost too late.

Her voice is unmistakable. Berlin looks at life with the sarcasm of someone who has already lost her illusions, but has not yet lost her tenderness. And that is what makes her dangerous to our certainties.

Lucia Berlin (1936–2004) was invisible for decades. Woman, poor, alcoholic, working-class. And inconveniently brilliant. Her writing, composed in the intervals between low-paying jobs and solitary motherhood, reflects someone who lived as she wrote. She was a telephone operator, nurse, teacher, mother of four children, and one of the finest short-story writers America ever produced. Ignored in life, celebrated after death. 

Welcome to the House is a farewell wave. Like everything in her.