Books

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.

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 Prize–winning “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).

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 finalist

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. 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 Jeffrey 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.