Shakespeare's Kitchen: Stories

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

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.

Shakespeare's Kitchen, Lore Segal's first major work of fiction in more than twenty years, was widely celebrated upon its publication in hardcover. Serialized in The New Yorker and excerpted in the 2008 O. Henry Prize Stories collection, it was also a Book Sense Pick, a Pick of the Week in both Entertainment Weekly and People magazine, and a Summer Reading Pick in Oprah's O Magazine.

In these "wry, finely honed, interlocking stories" (Atlantic Monthly), Segal offers a brilliant and nuanced portrayal of the lives of a close-knit group of friends and colleagues in a fictional college town in Connecticut. Told through a series of unforgettable dinner parties, afternoon picnics, and Sunday brunches, "the cumulative power of Shakespeare's Kitchen lies in Segal's dazzling ability to merge the mundane details of life with the arc of human emotion" (Washington Post Book World). It's a deeply moving work that marks the triumphant return of a writer at the height of her powers.