Lore Segal

Following her acclaimed Ladies'' Lunch novella (2023), Lore Segal continued to create stories about a fictional group of nonagenarian friends as they faced the last years, months and moments of their lives. For Lore Segal, the importance lay in ''still talking'', and still writing to the very end. Fittingly, her last story was published in the New Yorker in the week that she died, aged ninety-six.This posthumous novella of interconnected stories and vignettes is enriched by Segal''s inspiring wit and wisdom, her compassionate gaze, and her unquenchable curiosity about life. It''s a book that entreats us to keep talking, regardless of differences and the trials of ageing - a book that we''ll still be talking about many years hence.

With an introduction by Jeffery Renard Allen It''s the early 1950s. Ilka Weissnix, a newly arrived Jewish-Austrian refugee, boards a train from New York hoping to find a ''real American''. In a railroad bar she meets Carter Bayoux, an urbane Black American intellectual. Although twice her age and in the grip of alcoholism, his amused, compassionate worldliness enthrals her. She finds - ''with his first, slightest touch, under her elbow'' - that she has fallen in love. Lore Segal described Her First American as ''her favourite child'', a reckoning and rendering with her own experiences in the 1950s. Her astonishingly vivid portrait of the charismatic Carter Bayoux, the glimpses he offers of New York''s Black cultural life and the loneliness of addiction, are drawn with nuance, wit and truth. Segal illuminates from an outsider''s perspective both the deep wounds of racism and a bright moment of Black American and Jewish solidarity.