Lore Segal

Ladies’ Lunch

Other People's Houses

She's Ilka Weissnix, a young Jewish refugee from Hitler's Europe, newly arrived in the United States. He's Carter Bayoux, her first American: a middle-aged, hard-drinking black intellectual. Lore Segal's brilliant novel is the story of their love affair--one of the funniest and saddest in modern fiction.

Her First American

A brilliant and scathing look at the New York literary scene which was a sensational hit when first released and has remained a cult classic ever since. Fresh as ever, the witty and whimsical novella follows poet Lucinella in her adventures among the literati as she travels from Yaddo-like writers' colonies to the grit of the city, where writers are confronted with questions of how husbands, publishers and filing systems can boost their careers and get their lives in order.

Lucinella

"For almost six decades Segal has quietly produced some of the best fiction and essays in American literature..."—The New York Times Beloved New Yorker writer Lore Segal, at 95-years-old, is a national treasure. Working at the height of her powers, in this story collection she turns her gimlet eye and compassionate humor on aging and life in the slow lane. From the master of the short short comes a collection of 16 new stories featuring old friends who have loved and lunched together for over 40 years. These erudite, sharp-minded nonagenarians offer startling insights into friendship, family and aging. Can the group organize a visit to one of their number in her new, and detested, assisted living situation? Is this a fabulous party with old friends, or a funeral reception? And does who was sleeping with whom, way back when, still matter? In story after story, Segal's voice is always hilarious and urbane, heartbreaking and profound, keen and utterly unsentimental, as she tackles aging's affronts.

and Other Stories

Ladies' Lunch

Stories

Shakespeare's Kitchen

New York Times Notable Book 2013 "No one writes like Segal — her glittering intelligence, her piercing wit, and her dazzling insights into manners and mores, are a profound pleasure. From first to last I loved this wise and irreverent novel." —Margot Livesey "I always feel in her work such a sense of toughness and humor…. Her writing is sad and funny, and that makes it more of both." —Jennifer Egan “Lore Segal is a marvelous and fearless writer. No subject is too hard, too absurd, or too painful for her wise, peculiar and brilliant fiction.” —Lily Tuck The renowned New Yorker writer and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lore Segal—whom The New York Times declared "closer than anyone to writing the Great American Novel"—delivers a hilarious, poignant and profoundly moving tale of living, loving and aging in America today At Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, doctors have noticed a marked uptick in Alzheimer's patients. People who seemed perfectly lucid just a day earlier suddenly show signs of advanced dementia. Is it just normal aging, or an epidemic? Is it a coincidence, or a secret terrorist plot? In the looking-glass world of Half the Kingdom—where terrorist paranoia and end-of-the-world hysteria mask deeper fears of mortality; where parents' and their grown children's feelings vacillate between frustration and tenderness; and where the broken medical system leads one character to quip, "Kafka wrote slice-of-life fiction"—all is familiar and yet slightly askew. Lore Segal masterfully interweaves her characters' lives—lives that, for good or for ill, all converge in Cedar's ER—into a funny, tragic, and tender portrait of how we live today. From the Hardcover edition.

A Novel

Half the Kingdom

With a foreword by Cynthia Ozick, this semiautobiographical novel of a Jewish girl forced away from home in the face of Nazi persecution is an extraordinary tale of fortitude and survival On a December night in 1938, a ten-year-old girl named Lore is put on the Kindertransport, a train carrying hundreds of Jewish children out of Austria to safety from Hitler’s increasingly alarming oppression. Temporarily housed at the Dover Court Camp on England’s east coast, Lore will find herself living in other people’s houses for the next seven years: the Orthodox Levines, the Hoopers, the working-class Grimsleys, and the wealthy Miss Douglas and Mrs. Dillon. Charged with the task of asking “the English people” to get her parents out of Austria, Lore discovers in herself an impassioned writer. In letters to potential sponsors, she details the horrors happening back at home; in those to her parents, she notes the mannerisms and reactions of the new families around her as she valiantly tries to master their language. And the closer the world comes to a new war, the more resolute Lore becomes to survive. As powerful now as when it was first released fifty years ago, Other People’s Houses is a poignant tale about the creation of a new life in the face of hopelessness and fear—a hallmark of the postwar immigration experience.

A fortieth anniversary edition of the author's semi-autobiographical first novel follows the experiences of a ten-year-old girl who flees her Nazi-occupied homeland and finds shelter in England with three families including the Jewish Orthodox Levines, the working-class Hoopers, and two elderly sisters from a formal Victorian household. Reprint.

A sixtieth-anniversary edition of Lore Segal's "immensely impressive" (The New Republic) semi-autobiographical novel of a Jewish girl's escape to England from Vienna after Hitler's rise to power--"both moving and newly relevant" (The Guardian) Originally published in 1964 and hailed by critics including Cynthia Ozick and Elie Wiesel, Other People's Houses tells the story of a ten-year-old girl who, alongside hundreds of other Jewish children, boards the Kindertransport to England to escape the Nazi occupation and oppression in Vienna in 1938. Over the course of the next seven years, Lore lives with various families in "other people's houses"--ranging from the homes of the wealthy Orthodox Jewish Levines, the working-class Hoopers, and two elderly sisters in their formal Victorian household. As the war looms and Lore becomes enmeshed in the effort to get her parents out of Austria, she also becomes a passionate writer, documenting her struggles and displacement in letters to a variety of potential sponsors. Brilliantly highlighting the cultural differences between Vienna and England, the novel showcases the immigrant experience through the eyes of a young writer who would go on to become the highly acclaimed "brilliant and boundary-breaking" (Los Angles Review of Books) star of international fiction. Told through the unique and moving perspective of a child forced to grow up quickly, Other People's Houses is the "groundbreaking and indomitable" (Forbes) tale of one girl's captivating refugee experience and the strength and bravery it takes to start over--and to survive.

'First published 54 years ago and yet feels as timely as any book I've read this year' Observer Nine months after the Nazi occupation of Austria, 600 Jewish Children assembled at Vienna station to board the first of the Kindertransports bound for Britain. Among them was 10 year old Lore Segal. For the next seven years, she lived as a refugee in other people's houses, moving from the Orthodox Levines in Liverpool, to the staunchly working class Hoopers in Kent, to the genteel Miss Douglas and her sister in Guildford. Few understood the terrors she had fled, or the crushing responsibility of trying to help her parents gain a visa. Amazingly she succeeds and two years later her parents arrive; their visa allows them to work as domestic servants - a humiliation for which they must be grateful. In Other People's Houses Segal evokes with deep compassion, clarity and calm the experience of a child uprooted from a loving home to become stranded among strangers.

Tell Me a Mitzi

"For almost six decades Segal has quietly produced some of the best fiction and essays in American literature, as this generous sampler attests."—The New York Times "Segal is a monumental writer, one of the finest of her generation; this lovely collection is a fine introduction to her work."—Kirkus Reviews A DEFINITIVE COLLECTION FROM ONE OF AMERICA'S FINEST WRITERS—INCLUDING NEW AND NEVER-BEFORE-COLLECTED WORK From the award-winning New Yorker writer comes this essential volume spanning almost six decades. Admired for “a voice unlike any other” (Cynthia Ozick) and a style both “wry and poignant” (The New Yorker), Lore Segal is a master literary stylist. This volume collects some of her finest work—including new and uncollected writing—and selections from her novels, stories, and essays. From her very first story—which appeared in The New Yorker in 1961—to today, Segal’s voice has been unique in contemporary American literature: Hilarious and urbane, heartbreaking and profound, keen and utterly unsentimental. Segal has often used her own biography as both subject and inspiration: At age ten she was sent on the Kindertransport from Vienna to England to escape the Nazi invasion of Austria; grew up among English foster families; and eventually made her way to the United States. This experience was the impetus for her first novel, Other People’s Houses, and one that she has revisited throughout her career. From that beginning, Segal’s writing has ranged widely across form as well as subject matter. Her flawless prose and light touch belie the rigor and intelligence she brings to her art—qualities that were not missed by the New York Times reviewer who pointedly observed, “though it was not written by a man . . . Segal may have come closer than anyone to writing The Great American Novel.” With this volume comes a long-awaited career retrospective of an important American Writer.

New and Selected Writing

The Journal I Did Not Keep

Mrs. Lovewright was a chilly person. When it got night outside, she closed her door and made herself a fire; then she took off her shoes and put her feet up on the stool, and that's when Mrs. Lovewright knew that there was something and she didn't have it. "There's no being cozy without a cat," she said. So here -- back in print -- is the story of Mrs. Lovewright and that cat, who would not and would not be cozy, from acclaimed author Lore Segal and Caldecott-winning artist Paul O. Zelinsky.

The Story of Mrs. Lovewright and Purrless Her Cat

Three household adventures in the life of Mitzi include an intended trip to grandmother's, sharing a family cold, and reversing the President's motorcade.

Leonard Baskin

An anthology of stories from the Old Testament presents a chronicle of the generations from Adam to Moses, recounting the sagas of the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah, the Patriarchs, and Moses and the Exodus.

The Book of Adam to Moses

The thirteen interrelated stories of Shakespeare’s Kitchen concern the universal longing for friendship, how we achieve new intimacies for ourselves, and how slowly, inexplicably, we lose them. Featuring six never-before-published pieces, Lore Segal’s stunning new book evolved from seven short stories that originally appeared in the New Yorker (including the O. Henry Prize–winning “The Reverse Bug”). Ilka Weisz has accepted a teaching position at the Concordance Institute, a think tank in Connecticut, reluctantly leaving her New York circle of friends. After the comedy of her struggle to meet new people, Ilka comes to embrace, and be embraced by, a new set of acquaintances, including the institute’s director, Leslie Shakespeare, and his wife, Eliza. Through a series of memorable dinner parties, picnics, and Sunday brunches, Segal evokes the subtle drama and humor of the outsider’s loneliness, the comfort and charm of familiar companionship, the bliss of being in love, and the strangeness of our behavior in the face of other people’s deaths. A magnificent and deeply moving work, Shakespeare’s Kitchen marks the long-awaited return of a writer at the height of her powers.

Lore Segal

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