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“... Lucia Berlin died on 12 November 2004, her 68th birthday. Almost all of her short stories can be found in three volumes published by Black Sparrow Press: ‘Homesick: New and Selected Stories’ (1990), ‘So Long: Stories 1987-92’ (1993) and ‘Where I Live Now: Stories 1993-98’ (1999). The earliest of the stories dates from 1977 ...”

“... Lucia Berlin is a Western writer, by which I do not mean a genre writer of cowboy tales like Zane Grey or the younger Elmore Leonard, but that her stories, with only a few exceptions, are situated west of the Great Plains or in Mexico. Berlin herself was born in Alaska and spent most of her childhood in Chile – a setting for several stories ...”

“... There​ ought to be a cult, really, of teenagers with Lucia Berlin’s books in their back pockets, hair combed into black bouffants, imitating her squint against sunlight. The writers she is most directly associated with – Robert Creeley and Ed Dorn – were of the Black Mountain School, but she seems somehow to have more to do with the Beats, perhaps because she was always on the run; perhaps because of the drug addiction of her third husband, Buddy Berlin; perhaps because you can easily imagine her holding a tambourine or with her legs crossed around a bongo drum ...”

“... mothers in mid- century America. Beard shares seriocomic territory not only with Moore, but with Lucia Berlin, Joy Williams and Grace Paley. The problem with charm, as Angela Carter wrote in a piece about Paley in these pages, is that it can be cloying (LRB, 17 April 1980). ‘You’re helping someone out for once,’ a mother says to her grown son. A ...”

“... Elizabeth Hardwick, Jean Stafford (these two had been better known as Robert Lowell’s wives) and Lucia Berlin, whose luminous short stories seem to me as good as anyone’s. Now Picador have published Blue in Chicago, a collection of stories by Bette Howland, born in 1937, a Jewish writer from a working-class neighbourhood in Chicago. She married and ...”

“... us,’ Chagall later wrote. World events were rumbling. He left Paris early in 1914, stopping in Berlin in May for the first exhibition of his work, mounted by Herwarth Walden in his gallery Der Sturm, before returning to Russia. It was the last time he saw Apollinaire, who died four years later of the Spanish flu. It was also the last time he saw Paris in ...”

“... and flexibility of articulation unparalleled in this century: we are not short of interpreters of Lucia di Lammermoor or of tenori di grazia who can skate up and down the runs of a Rossini aria. It could reasonably be argued that we hear pre-Classical music sung more idiomatically, and serial and post-serial music more competently, than our fathers did. The ...”

“... force, this imaginative map ingrained with irony. Starting from a description of a Greek statue in Berlin, it moves towards the               middle of the earth, yearned- for stepmotherland of Hölderlin and Goethe that is Hellas, and remains, even through a sequence of undistinguished poems on George Eliot and Dorothy Wordsworth, haunted by ...”