Lucia Berlin

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lucia Berlin (born Lucia Brown November 12, 1936 in Juneau , Alaska ; died November 12, 2004 in Marina del Rey near Los Angeles ) was an American writer.

Life

Lucia Brown was the daughter of a mining engineer who was assigned to changing jobs in Idaho, Kentucky and Montana. In 1941 he was drafted as a soldier and she lived with her mother and sister with her grandfather in El Paso . After the war the family moved to Santiago de Chile for a period . At the age of ten, Lucia fell ill with scoliosis , which later forced her to wear a corset, her breathing was so impaired that she needed a breathing apparatus near her since 1994. From 1955 she studied at the University of New Mexico . One of their teachers there was Ramon Sender . Brown married in Albuquerque and had two sons. Under the influence of Edward Dorn , she began to write as Lucia Newton there and then moved to New York with her second husband, a jazz musician, in the neighborhood of writers Denise Levertov and Mitchell Goodman . In 1961 she moved to Mexico with her third husband, Buddy Berlin , and they had two other sons. Because of his drug addiction, this marriage was divorced in 1968. She then worked for a short time as a substitute teacher at the University of New Mexico and then spent many years in low-paying jobs in Berkeley and Oakland as a telephone operator, hospital nurse, cleaning lady, doctor's assistant and teacher, raised her four children as a single parent and grew up with theirs Health problems still dependent on alcohol.

Between 1991 and 1994, Berlin spent most of the time by the side of her sister, who died of cancer, in Mexico City .

On the mediation of Edward Dorn, she finally taught creative writing at the University of Colorado Boulder from 1994 . Her teaching was valued by the students, and her teaching position was extended as an associate professorship in 1996 . However, the low mountain range in Boulder was detrimental to her breathing, so that seriously ill, she gave up her job in 2000 and moved to the vicinity of her children.

plant

Berlin has been writing literary articles for magazines such as The Atlantic since 1960 . Her first, narrow volume of short stories, Angels Laundromat , was published in 1981. She published her short stories in six separate editions, which were then again summarized in three volumes from 1990 (1990, 1993 and 1999). A total of 76 of their stories were published.

In 2015, Lydia Davis wrote the foreword to a new edition of a selection of short stories edited by Stephen Emerson . The book made it into the final selection for the Kirkus Review Prize and one of the ten best books of 2015 in the New York Times Book Review . The German translation of the selection, shortened from 43 to 30 stories, is introduced by a foreword by the translator Antje Rávic Strubel .

The title of the German edition What else I have missed refers to the story Finding Your Home , in which the first-person narrator reviews her life and uses her position on the veranda as a metaphor for inattention. “What else have I missed? How many times in my life have I been on the back porch instead of the front? What have I been told without my hearing? What love may have existed that I didn't feel? "

Awards

Publications

  • A Manual for Cleaning Ladies . Illustrations Michael Myers. Zephyrus Image, Washington, DC 1977.
  • Angels Laundromat: Short Stories. Turtle Island Foundation for the Netzahaulcoyotl Historical Society, Berkeley, CA 1981, ISBN 0-913666-35-1 .
  • Legacy. Illustrations Michael Bradley. Poltroon Press, Berkeley 1983.
  • Phantom Pain: Sixteen Stories. Tombouctou Books, Bolinas 1984.
  • Safe & Sound. Poltroon Press, illustrations by Frances Butler. Berkeley 1988.
  • Homesick: New & Selected Stories. Black Sparrow Press, Santa Rosa 1990.
  • So Long: Stories, 1987-1992. Black Sparrow Press, Santa Rosa 1993.
  • Where I Live Now: Stories, 1993-1998. Black Sparrow Press, Santa Rosa 1999.
  • A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories . Stephen Emerson Editor. Preface by Lydia Davis . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY 2015.
  • What will you do when you go Arche Literatur Verlag, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-7160-2767-7 .
  • Evening in Paradise: More Stories . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY 2018. ISBN 978-0374279486 .
    • Evening in paradise. Stories. Translation by Antje Rávic Strubel. Kampa Verlag, Zurich 2019, ISBN 978-3-311-10015-7 .
  • Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs and Letters . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY 2018. ISBN 9780374287597 .
    • Welcome home. Memories, pictures and letters . Translation by Antje Rávic Strubel. Kampa Verlag, Zurich 2019, ISBN 978-3-311-10011-9 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A Manual for Cleaning Women. Reviews. at: us.macmillan.com
  2. ↑ Michaela Mottinger: A long overdue literary rediscovery. Mottingers Opinion, August 16, 2016, accessed June 9, 2017 .
  3. ↑ What if the bodies were see-through? In: FAZ . April 28, 2016, p. 10.
personal data
SURNAME Berlin, Lucia
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Brown, Lucia (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH November 12, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Juneau , Alaska , USA
DATE OF DEATH November 12, 2004
Place of death Marina del Rey , California , USA