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Quick Pick: August 21, 2015

Spotlighting one of the week's raddest new releases

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Liberty Hardy

Senior Contributing Editor

Liberty Hardy is an unrepentant velocireader, writer, bitey mad lady, and tattoo canvas. Turn-ons include books, books and books. Her favorite exclamation is “Holy cats!” Liberty reads more than should be legal, sleeps very little, frequently writes on her belly with Sharpie markers, and when she dies, she’s leaving her body to library science. Until then, she lives with her three cats, Millay, Farrokh, and Zevon, in Maine. She is also right behind you. Just kidding! She’s too busy reading. Twitter: @MissLiberty

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manual for cleaning womenA Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin

Elizabeth McCracken, one of our greatest American writers, has been pushing this book, and since she led me to Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail by Kelly Luce, I read this forthcoming story collection as soon as I could! And what a gem it is. This is a collection of Berlin’s best work. (She died in 2004.) A Manual for Cleaning Women contains gritty stories of the ordinary, the downtrodden, the struggling, that are made beautiful through her amazing writing. You’ll soon be hearing about this one everywhere.(And if you haven’t read Elizabeth McCracken yet, I recommend you do! Her latest collection, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, is out in paperback this week.)

Backlist bump: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by, er, Lydia Davis

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