The short story collection Instructions for Domestic Help (first edition in Greek 2018) introduced to the international audience, ten years after her death, a great author who had unjustly fallen into oblivion. Evening in Paradise, Lucia Berlin's second collection, confirms her place in the pantheon of American letters, equal to that of Raymond Carver and Alice Munro. The twenty-two stories in the book take the reader on a journey to the places where the author lived, in Texas, Chile, New York, Mexico, introducing them to the most diverse human types, from musicians and painters to drug dealers and from restless teenagers to showbiz legends like John Huston, Ava Gardner, and Liz Taylor. Wherever she is, whatever she describes, Berlin records the loneliness of people, reveals the beauty behind the ugliness, and always discerns hope in the darkness. Some of her characters struggle with fame, others with the monotony of an unbearable, boring daily life, others with the deprivations of a bohemian life. Autobiographical at their root, her stories transform with imagination and tenderness a life marked by constant relocations, successive emotional upheavals, and existential quests. Her subtle humor becomes a vehicle for overcoming every trial, an excavating tool that brings to the surface the small miracles of every life, which her elegant pen turns into literary gems.