Jeffrey Ann Goudie is a freelance journalist and book reviewer who appears regularly on Kansas City’s NPR affiliate to dish about books with fellow book critics. Although a few are slight, most vibrate with felt life.

Juxtaposing beauty and brutality, affection and aggression, freedom and duty, these stories offer the feel of reality with the depth of distilled meaning. And the last story, about a retired teacher traveling alone in Mexico City, uses the stylized death of the bull in the ring to highlight the tragedy of unexpected death. In one of these, set outside a coastal village in Mexico, a violent act occurs amid stunning natural beauty. Later stories are about mothers of young children, whose partners are distant, missing or dodgy with drugs, who try to hold the domestic scene together. The narrator’s itinerary is eclipsed by the one that unfolds, which provides missing pieces of her father’s life. In “Itinerary,” the college-bound narrator is flying alone from Chile to New Mexico, with a purse full of contacts and an itinerary set by her father that includes stops in Peru with his secretary, in Panama with a business associate and in Miami with an aunt. Sent for a few days to the estate of one of the richest men in Chile, Laura loses her virginity in a story of excess privilege, wasted power, reform and revolution. In “Andado: A Gothic Romance,” 14-year-old Laura has been thrust into the role of her father’s social companion because of a depressed mother confined to her bedroom with drink or pills. “At an angle, shining through the glass like a cathedral window.” “For only a few days, from our position low on the ground, we could see beneath the weeds on the lot at the very moment when the sun lit the mosaic carpet of glass,” Berlin writes. Full of childhood wonder, the girls notice the beauty in everyday things, whether a night sky of shooting stars, or the way the setting sun illuminates the broken glass littering the vacant lot next door to the Haddad house. Two of the early stories are set in El Paso, Texas, in 1943 and feature 7-year-old girls: Lucha and her Syrian friend, Hope. The stories are arranged chronologically, with main characters who seem like stand-ins for the author. They also hum with undercurrents of the glimpsed, the unknown and the unnoticed. Evocative and alive with detail, they reveal keenly observed life.

“Evening in Paradise” is the second posthumous gathering, with 22 more of the 76 stories she published during her lifetime. Her first posthumous collection, the widely praised “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” contained 43 short stories that centered on female characters whose lives resembled Berlin’s.

Lucia Berlin (1936-2004) lived a life of wealth and also poverty.

Evening in Paradise by Lucia Berlin