Let me play catch-up for a moment and note that Newsday ran my review of
Shakespeare's Kitchen back on April 22. I was enchanted by Lore Segal's interconnected stories, so intensely stylized but also painful and comically appalling--which is to say,
real. I'm hoping she'll speed up production so that the next book comes out before 2027. Here's how I began:
"By nature," Lore Segal told an interviewer in 1985, "I am infinitely slow." At the time, she was accounting for the two decades (give or take a year) it took her to write Her First American." Well, another two decades have passed. And Ilka Weissnix, the Viennese refugee whose prolonged and painful transplantation to the New World was the subject of that earlier novel, has returned.
By the time we encounter her in Shakespeare's Kitchen--a collection of stories so effectively soldered together that we may as well call it a novel--Ilka has exiled herself once again, this time to suburban Connecticut. This is something of a puzzle. Having gotten a toehold in New York City ("naturalized," as the Viennese-born Segal once wrote of herself, "not in North America so much as in Manhattan"), why would she ever leave?
You can read the rest
here.
# posted by James Marcus @ 9:39 PM
Let me play catch-up for a moment and note that Newsday ran my review of Shakespeare's Kitchen back on April 22. I was enchanted by Lore Segal's interconnected stories, so intensely stylized but also painful and comically appalling--which is to say, real. I'm hoping she'll speed up production so that the next book comes out before 2027. Here's how I began: 
