Five 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 placed unhappily in a home the others conspire to spring her. Lore Segal's witty, yet poignant, short story, Ladies' Lunch, appeared in the New Yorker in 2017, when she herself turned ninety. It was followed by four New Yorker sequels. For this sparkling collection, Segal returns to her group of erudite, sharp-minded nonagenarians in Upper Manhattan offering startling insights into friendship and mortality. In the book's Other Stories, Segal includes tales from her acclaimed and prizewinning oeuvre to illuminate the hinterland of her characters - one of whom, like her, was a Kindertransport refugee. Beautifully crafted and profound, these stories distil the spirit of one of America's great authors to show us what a long life might bring.

Nine 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 class Hoopers in Kent, to the genteel Miss Douglas and her sister in Guildford. Few understood the terrors she had fled, or the crushing responsibility of trying to help her parents gain a visa. Amazingly she succeeds and two years later her parents arrive; their visa allows them to work as domestic servants - a humiliation for which they must be grateful.

In Other People's Houses Segal evokes with deep compassion, clarity and calm the experience of a child uprooted from a loving home to become stranded among strangers.

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 as ever: the story of the whimsical New York poet Lucinella and her adventures among the literati. It starts at Yaddo writers colony, where life is idyllic, meals are served to you in your rooms, and cocktails are ready at day's end ... and still the writers complain and compete. Then it moves back to New York City, where the pampered once again face reality, and wonder: Will a different husband ... or the right publisher ... or the perfect filing system ... put life in order?
Lucinella and her circle feel lacking and keep looking, busily going to parties and watching one another 's lives closely for signs of happiness, love and despair.
Segal depicts it all with a perfect blend of love and malice. And at the center is Lucinella herself, so full of humanity and frailty that these divertissements do her to death. "Here," as Cynthia Ozick says, "is the enchanted microcosm, the laughter of mortality."
The Contemporary Art of the Novella series is designed to highlight work by major authors from around the world. In most instances, as with Imre Kertesz, it showcases work never before published; in others, books are reprised that should never have gone out of print. It is intended that the series feature many well-known authors and some exciting new discoveries. And as with the original series, The Art of the Novella, each book is a beautifully packaged and inexpensive volume meant to celebrate the form and its practitioners.

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.

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. Lore Segal's brilliant novel is the story of their love affair--one of the funniest and saddest in modern fiction. First published by Knopf in 1985, Her First American is widely considered to be a modern classic. It is about the process of "naturalization," about the differences and the common ground between peoples and people. It is also about Jews and Blacks, whose experience, to quote Carter Bayoux, is parallel in the sense that two lines are parallel: running side by side but never meeting: except that this man and woman are able, for a time, to love. Wholly original. Her First American is an unforgettable novel, humorous, sad, and deeply moving.

Now in paperback, this European bestseller won huge -acclaim from U.S. critics, Jonathan Yardley of the "Washington Post Book World "declared this memoir of a Holocaust girlhood and a life reclaimed "one of the best books of 2001 . . . a book of surpassing, and at times brutal, honesty. . . . Among the many reasons that "Still Alive "is such an important book is its insistence that the full texture of women's existence in the Holocaust be acknowledged."

Ruth Kluger's story of her years in several concentration camps, and her struggle to establish a life after the war as a refugee survivor in New York, has emerged as one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust. Still Alive is a memoir of the pursuit of selfhood against all odds, a fiercely bittersweet coming-of-age story in which the protagonist must learn never to rely on comforting assumptions, but always to seek her own truth.

"A deeply moving and significant work . . . compared by European critics to the work of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel."--"Publishers Weekly"

"A stunning contemplation of human relationships, power and the creation of history. . . . A work of such nuance, intelligence and force that it leaps the bounds of genre."--"Kirkus Reviews"

Ruth Kluger is professor emerita of German at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of five books about German literature and the recipient of Austria's National Prize for Literary Criticism. Her widely translated memoir has won eight European Literary awards. Lore Segal's writings include the novels "Other People's Houses "and "Her First American."

Originally published in 1964 and hailed by critics including Cynthia Ozick and Elie Wiesel, Other People's Houses is Lore Segal's internationally acclaimed semi-autobiographical first novel. Nine months after Hitler takes Austria, a ten-year-old girl leaves Vienna aboard a children's transport that is to take her and several hundred children to safety in England. For the next seven years she lives in "other people's houses," the homes of the wealthy Orthodox Jewish Levines, the working-class Hoopers, and two elderly sisters in their formal Victorian household. An insightful and witty depiction of the ways of life of those who gave her refuge, Other People's Houses is a wonderfully memorable novel of the immigrant experience.