Description

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”.

Publisher Review

Lore Segal has the sharp analytic eye of a born writer * The New York Times Book Review * Segal has the dazzling ability to merge the mundane details of life with the arc of human emotions * The Washington Post * I always feel in her work such a sense of toughness and humor … Her writing is sad and funny, and that makes it more of both — Jennifer Egan Lore Segal is a national treasure, brilliant, unsentimental, and wry * LitHub * Segal is a monumental writer, one of the finest of her generation * Kirkus Review * Her themes are big – memory, genocide, refugees, race – but her approach is fine-grained * The Paris Review *