Shakespeare's Kitchen: Stories

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Description

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 Prizewinning "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 longawaited return of a writer at the height of her powers.

Reviews

Her First American outdistances our contemporary expectations of fiction ... to maintain a lasting place not only in American literature but in that of the world." -- Stanley Crouch
Other People's Houses is inconceivably moving." -- Cynthia Ozick
Every now and then a piece of work bursts the bounds of its own conventions ... announcing the existence in our midst of a genuine writer." -- Vivian Gornick
Lore Segal is ... one of those rare people who combine art, eccentricity, honesty, and wisdom and who, by a change of tone, an altered inflection, produce such enchanting effects that the reader is swept along."
Lore Segal may have come closer than anyone to writing the Great American Novel."

Author Bio

Lore Segal, and other publications.