Ilka Weisz is in need not just of friends but ‘elective cousins’. She has left her home in New York to accept a junior teaching post at the prestigious Concordance Institute, a liberal college in bucolic Connecticut. But how can she, a Jewish refugee from Vienna, find a new set to belong to – a surrogate family? Might the Shakespeares – the institute’s director and his wry, acerbic wife – hold the key?
In these interlinked New Yorker stories, Lore Segal evokes the comic melancholy of the outsider and the ineffectual ambitions of a progressive, predominantly WASP-ish institution. Tragedy and loss haunt characters as they plan an academic symposium on genocide, while their privileged lives contrast starkly with those on a derelict housing project next door.
Includes the acclaimed New Yorker podcast story, ‘The Reverse Bug’.
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Lore Segal (1928- 2024) was born in Vienna and at the age of ten was evacuated to London on the Kindertransport. She settled in New York in 1951 and began writing for the New Yorker, remaining a regular contributor for over sixty three years.The author of five novels and story collections, Segal has won an American Academy Award (for Her First American), and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize (for An Absence of Cousins, under its original title Shakespeare’s Kitchen) plus numerous prizes for her short stories, including the O.Henry Award (twice).Sort of Books also publish Segal’s novella, Ladies’ Lunch (2023), and republished her 1964 novel Other People’s Houses about her time in Britain as a child refugee.