Lucia Berlin's stories present revelations based on her experiences and observations. They are set mainly in the western United States, spanning the time from World War II to the present, and they chronicle the movements of girls, adolescents, and women without places of origin. They have no city to call home. This fact frees Berlin to present to the reader the cities within, dark cities of the interior within the darker city of the modern age. The women in these stories are constantly seeking an origin that is never to be known; they are bound by no place. With a straightforward prose narrative, Berlin provides the reader with a grounding in the drama of contemporary American life.

Berlin's father, Wendell Theodore Brown, was a mining engineer from Lawrence, Massachusetts. He attended the Texas School of Mines in El Paso, where he met Berlin's mother, Mary Emma Magruder, a...