Seven stories that teach resilience

Keggie Carew won the Costa Biography Award 2016 for her shape shifting memoir, Dadland. Before writing her career was in contemporary art. Her new book is Quicksand Tales.

At the Guardian she tagged seven tales of failure...and resilience. One title on the list:

Drawing on her life, Lucia Berlin’s short stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women are itinerant and restless as she drifts between towns and jobs – as a cleaner, a nurse, a switchboard operator – and relationships. Booze-soaked marginal lives are never far away as we see her working in a laundromat, a bar – or on the way to visit a drug dealer. Life throws up hardship and incident, and Berlin’s observations are transmuted into wry and coruscating prose. “My whole life I’ve run into these situations, like that morning with the psychiatrist,” she begins, and we are in her grip.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue