Lore Segal – författare

A classic novel of the immigrant experience“Lore Segal may have come closer than anyone to writing the Great American Novel.” —The New York Times Book ReviewShe’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.

'First published 54 years ago and yet feels as timely as any book I've read this year' ObserverNine 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.

'These ladies are perfect company' The Times'Lore Segal has the sharp analytic eye of a born writer' The New York Times Book Review'There is humour even in the most heart-breaking of her stories' Telegraph Five close friends in their 90s meet - as they have for decades - for their monthly 'ladies lunch', to puzzle, and laugh at, the enigmas and affronts of ageing. When one of their number is placed unhappily in a home the others conspire to spring her.Lore Segal's witty, yet poignant, short story, Ladies' Lunch, appeared in the New Yorker in 2017, when she herself turned ninety. It was followed by four New Yorker sequels. For this sparkling collection, Segal returns to her group of erudite, sharp-minded nonagenarians in Upper Manhattan offering startling insights into friendship and mortality.In the book's Other Stories, Segal includes tales from her acclaimed and prizewinning oeuvre to illuminate the hinterland of her characters - one of whom, like her, was a Kindertransport refugee.Beautifully crafted and profound, these stories distil the spirit of one of America's great authors to show us what a long life might bring.

Ilka Weisz is in need not just of friends but 'elective cousins'. She has left her home in New York to accept a junior teaching post at the prestigious Concordance Institute, a liberal college in bucolic Connecticut. But how can she, a Jewish refugee from Vienna, find a new set to belong to - a surrogate family? Might the Shakespeares - the institute's director and his wry, acerbic wife - hold the key?In these interlinked New Yorker stories, Lore Segal evokes the comic melancholy of the outsider and the ineffectual ambitions of a progressive, predominantly WASP-ish institution. Tragedy and loss haunt characters as they plan an academic symposium on genocide, while their privileged lives contrast starkly with those on a derelict housing project next door. Includes the acclaimed New Yorker podcast story, "The Reverse Bug".

With an introduction by Jeffery Renard Allen It's the early 1950s. Ilka Weissnix, a newly arrived Jewish-Austrian refugee, boards a train from New York hoping to find a 'real American'. In a railroad bar she meets Carter Bayoux, an urbane Black American intellectual. Although twice her age and in the grip of alcoholism, his amused, compassionate worldliness enthrals her. She finds - 'with his first, slightest touch, under her elbow' - that she has fallen in love. Lore Segal described Her First American as 'her favourite child', a reckoning and rendering with her own experiences in the 1950s. Her astonishingly vivid portrait of the charismatic Carter Bayoux, the glimpses he offers of New York's Black cultural life and the loneliness of addiction, are drawn with nuance, wit and truth. Segal illuminates from an outsider's perspective both the deep wounds of racism and a bright moment of Black American and Jewish solidarity.

Following her acclaimed Ladies' Lunch novella (2023), Lore Segal continued to create stories about a fictional group of nonagenarian friends as they faced the last years, months and moments of their lives. For Lore Segal, the importance lay in 'still talking', and still writing to the very end. Fittingly, her last story was published in the New Yorker in the week that she died, aged ninety-six.This posthumous novella of interconnected stories and vignettes is enriched by Segal's inspiring wit and wisdom, her compassionate gaze, and her unquenchable curiosity about life. It's a book that entreats us to keep talking, regardless of differences and the trials of ageing - a book that we'll still be talking about many years hence.

A fortieth-anniversary edition of the unforgettable, eccentric “truly original novel” (Newsday), an evocative tale of race, romance, and the complexities of the human—experience, by the Pulitzer Prize finalistShe’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. At first, their relationship is fueled by lust, but also by a shared sense of displacement, with Ilka having fled her homeland and Carter struggling to find his place in a society steeped in racism and prejudice.In an effort to assimilate and discover “the real America,” Ilka hurls herself into Carter’s chaotic world, helping him navigate depression, alcoholism, and the ghosts of his past—and present. Will Ilka sacrifice her own needs—and future—for Carter’s, or can she save him from the demons and traumas that are tearing him, and them, apart?First published forty years ago to universal acclaim, called “wonderful” by People magazine, and “quiet, funny, slyly affecting” in a starred Kirkus review, and now featuring a new introduction by acclaimed novelist Jeffery Renard Allen, Her First American cements its place among the great American novels and introduces a new generation of readers to the brilliant Lore Segal.

From the acclaimed author of Her First American, a 'charming novel disguised as a book of short stories,' (The New York Times Book Review) exploring belonging, connection, intimacy, and self-acceptance.The thirteen interconnected stories of Shakespeare's Kitchen capture the universal longing for friendship, how we achieve new intimacies for ourselves, and how slowly, inexplicably, we lose them. Featuring seven short stories that originally appeared in The New Yorker, including the O. Henry Prizewinning 'The Reverse Bug,' and including six additional pieces, Lore Segal's stunning collection 'exhibits a rare insight into the human character' (Publishers Weekly).Called 'an enchanting storyteller' by The Los Angeles Times, Segal unravels a web of human relationships as we meet Ilka Weisz, who, having accepted a teaching position at the Concordance Institute, a Connecticut think tank, reluctantly leaves 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, Sunday brunches, and long hours of kitchen conversation, Segal evokes the subtle drama and humor of an 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, wholly original 'comedy of manners set in academic' (Booklist), Shakespeare's Kitchen is 'filled with all the pomp and depressed glory of a modern day The Great Gatsby...' these vignettes are hilarious and telling. Segal exhibits a rare insight into the human character that is at once humbling and shamelessly enjoyable to behold" (Publishers Weekly).