What do you recommend?

“The book I’ve recently read and have been trumpeting about is A Manual for Cleaning Women, the selected stories of Lucia Berlin, who died in 2004. She is hilarious and heartbreaking, and the book has an addictive quality you might not associate with a fat book of short stories: You finish one story and want to leap into the next. I had the sense, as I was reading her work, that with every sentence she was becoming one of my favorite writers; I couldn’t believe it had taken me so long to find her. I also recently read and loved Greg Hrbek’s long-awaited second novel, Not On Fire But Burning, a strange and beautiful genre-busting novel about danger and memory.”

Elizabeth McCracken, author of Thunderstruck and Other Stories, now out in paperback

This story was originally published September 4, 2015 at 1:31 PM with the headline "What do you recommend?."