A 14-year-old girl in Chile is seduced by a wealthy widower moments after their carriage plunges into an icy stream. A pregnant woman murders her wealthy husband’s heroin dealer in Mexico while her children sleep upstairs. An old lady hurls abuse at her party guests from the roof of her house in Texas.

There are no cosy places to settle in the short stories of Lucia Berlin. The long-overlooked American writer walks us coolly into the unthinkable. “There are things people just don’t talk about,” says the teenage narrator in Dust to Dust, having witnessed the bloody death of her friend in a motorcycle race. “I don’t mean the hard things, like love, but the awkward ones, like how funerals are fun sometimes or how it’s exciting to watch buildings burning.”

Berlin died in 2004 and became something of a literary sensation in 2015 when 43 of her 77 stories were anthologised in A Manual for Cleaning Women. Evening in Paradise is a collection of 22 more raw, elliptical, devilishly funny tales that draw on her own precarious, peripatetic life. And Berlin was no wallflower. She was married three times – to a work-obsessed sculptor, an uncommunicative jazz pianist and a charming drug addict – and had four sons before the age of 30. She lived variously in Texas, Chile, New Mexico and New York, tried every kind of job from cleaner to university professor and experienced both wealth and poverty. Meanwhile, she wrote. Her stories were published by small journals and university presses from the 1960s to the 1980s, but her name remained a secret literary handshake among devotees such as Saul Bellow and Lydia Davis.

It’s clear from her rather batty letters that Berlin’s mind was always skipping ahead and reversing on itself

Berlin is now often held up alongside her male coevals – and fellow alcoholics – Raymond Carver and Richard Yates, so-called “dirty realists”, who cast cold, appraising eyes at the underbelly of American life. But these comparisons don’t do justice to the wily humour she developed in dealing with a generation of male artists deeply invested in maintaining male status. Time and again in Evening in Paradise, we encounter bohemian men who talk about poetry, jazz and painting but keep their wives stuck in crushing domestic routines. These wives hold the hot part of the cup when they pass the men their coffee, they iron their underwear so it’s warm when they wake up, but their pent-up frustration is never far from the surface. Some must endanger the life of the postman or watch the flame from a lantern set fire to a curtain just to feel alive.

This latest collection is by no means the dross left over from her last book, though some of the one-page flash fictions are more exercises in voice than immersive narratives. Characters, settings and themes recur but in a startling variety of registers. Two Wives, in which a pair of alcoholic women dissect their relationships with the same ex-husband, has the pickled wit of a Tom Waits song. “I wanted a baby so badly,” says the first wife. “We tried for years. Years. And fought over it, because I was so obsessed, each of us blaming the other. I could have killed that OB/GYN Rita when she had his baby.”

Arranged by her publishers in a roughly chronological order, the collection works as a sort of fractured autofiction too. You can’t help wondering if Berlin really did brain a drug dealer and dump him at sea, as described in La Barca de la Illusion. (It is characteristic that when the narrator fails to stab the associate to death, he changes into one of the husband’s T-shirts with the slogan “Support Mental Health.”) Berlin’s evocative but sketchy memoir, Welcome Home, also newly published, offers no clue as to whether the murder ever happened, but every other detail of the story is taken from real life.

Throughout these tales, cruelty is intertwined with compassion. The most poignant is Lead Street, Albuquerque, which tells of three young women who get pregnant so their husbands can avoid conscription to the Korean war. The narrator mocks the most “simple” wife in the trio before hearing her own snobbishness. “Came over one morning ecstatic because she figured out that she could just lie in bed and pull at the sheets and blankets tight, then just slide out carefully and tuck everything in. A real time-saver! She saved butter wrappers to oil cake pans with. Why am I being so petty? I loved her.”

The details are acute and funny, but it’s those final two lines that come back and smack you. It’s clear from her rather batty letters that Berlin’s mind was always skipping ahead and reversing on itself. “Alcoholics think more than most people and that’s the truth,” she writes in one story.

What does calm Berlin’s mind is nature, which creates a sustained pause in her work. Whenever her women feel despair, they find comfort in poplars, bougainvillea, hibiscus and gardenias. They plant seeds, but then they’re on the move again and rarely get to see them flourish.

Berlin’s own reputation is now in full bloom. It’s a shame she’s not around to enjoy it.

• Evening in Paradise: More Stories by Lucia Berlin is published by Picador (£14.99). To order a copy for £10.49 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99