Shakespeare’s Kitchen

Stories

Lore Segal

The much anticipated new book from the acclaimed author of Other People’s Houses and Her First American—Lore Segal’s first major work of fiction in twenty years

“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.” —Chicago Tribune

Finalist, 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

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.

Topics:

Literature

Praise

“Shakespeare’s Kitchen is a delicate and droll examination of a topic you don’t often encounter in American fiction: intimate friendship between consenting adults. . . . Segal is an enchanting storyteller.”

—Los Angeles Times

“[A] charming novel disguised as a book of short stories. . . . In Segal’s world, a world where domestic tragedies occur against the backdrop of historic human cruelty, people tend to behave badly not out of a perverted sense of ambition or power but from a deep need for attachment and belonging. . . . Lore Segal is an astute and gentle observer.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“Filled with all the pomp and depressed glory of a modern-day 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 (starred review)

“As the stories unspool and intertwine, one realizes that only in the hands of a master do a few vaguely defined characters and themes create such an exquisite tapestry. . . . The cumulative power of Shakespeare’s Kitchen lies in Segal’s dazzling ability to merge the mundane details of life—a missing pencil sharpener, a tipped-over garbage can—with the arc of human emotions.”