Hailed by the New York Times as coming "closer than anyone to writing The Great American Novel," Lore Segal stuns with this passionate love story of a refugee from Hitler's Europe and a witty, hard-drinking black intellectualFor Ilka Weissnix, everything is new. Having recently arrived in the United States, she is determined to escape the immigrant communities of New York and boards a train headed west to discover "the real America." She finds Carter Bayoux...

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 survivalOn 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 w...

**National Jewish Book Award FinalistThe New Yorker's Best Book of the Year!"For almost six decades Segal has quietly produced some of the best fiction and essays in American literature..."—The New York Times"Segal writes with welcome clarity about life’s final years, and if her characters are not always as wise as they think they are, Segal eyes them all with the unsentimental wisdom of a life spent writing wondrous stories and essays, a career sp...

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 S...

With an introduction by Jeffery Renard AllenIt'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.

'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 cla...

'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' TelegraphFive 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 ...

*"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....

"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"There are many standouts in the collection, but its single greatest strength is the consistency of Segal’s voic...

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 mel...

Intelligence turns me on.Lore Segal's tour de force look at the New York literary scene was a hit when it was first released in the 1970s, winning the praise of the literary elite. John Garnder called it “magical.” William Gass said it was “witty, elegant, beautiful.” Stanley Elkin called it “a shamelessly wonderful novel, so flawless one feels civilized reading it.”It's been a cult classic ever since, and appears here in its full, original text, as fresh a...

"For almost six decades Segal has quietly produced some of the best fiction and essays in American literature . . ." —The New York TimesBeloved New Yorker writer Lore Segal, at ninety-five 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 sixteen new stor...