Bookseller Favorites Should Reach Wider Audiences in Paperback

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh. When this debut novel by an accomplished short story writer (Moshfegh is a frequent contributor to the Paris Review) was published last Fall, critics doled out high praise and independent booksellers made it an Indie Next pick. Now that it's in paperback, this gritty noir tale should reach a much wider base of readers, especially those in book groups. The title character is a lonely, resentful young woman working in a boys prison in the early 60s who is pulled into a strange crime by a charismatic new prison counselor. Here's what one indie bookseller fan had to say: "Psychological thrillers don't get any better than this. Moshfegh masterfully captures the inner despair of a young mind filled with vitriol. Through atmospheric and unsettling writing, the cold dreariness of small-town New England seeps into readers' bones even as Eileen's twisted view of the world - desperate, angry, and vulnerable - seeps into the reading experience. Creepy, but morbidly funny too, Eileen, both the girl and the book, will be with readers long after the last page is turned." - Christopher Phipps, DIESEL: A Bookstore, Oakland, CA A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin. I confess to not being much a short story reader, but the response to this collection by bookseller colleagues may make me a convert. Berlin (1936-2004) was critically well received as a writer - compared to the likes of Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, and  Alice Munro - but hardly a household name during her lifetime, in part because her output was sporadic at best. Her stories were inspired by her early childhood in various Western mining towns; her glamorous teenage years in Santiago, Chile; three failed marriages; a lifelong problem with alcoholism; her years spent in Berkeley, New Mexico, and Mexico City; and the various jobs she later held to support her writing and her four sons. With the publication of A Manual for Cleaning Women and the support of independent bookstores, Berlin has finally been discovered by readers at large. Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, noted short story writer Molly Giles said of the book, "[The stories] are set in the places Berlin knows best: Chile, Mexico, the Southwest and California, and they have the casual, straightforward, immediately intimate style that distinguishes her work . . . [They] are told in an easy conversational voice and they go from start to finish with a swift and often lyrical economy . . . Berlin's stories capture and communicate these moments of grace and cast a lovely, lazy light that lasts. She is one of our finest writers and it is a pleasure to see her represented at the height of her powers."