RaveThe Christian Science MonitorReading Lore Segal's fiction is like peeling away intricately patterned wallpaper only to find another layer underneath. Shakespeare's Kitchen seems to me the best book by one of our best writers … In her best story, ‘The Reverse Bug,’ Segal adjusts the nonnative perspective. She populates the story with a Basque, a Turk, a German, a Jew, and a Latin, not to cast the ordinary world as fresh and strange but to accomplish the reverse: to make the strange seem ordinary … As I read Shakespeare's Kitchen, the critic in me left and I absorbed these stories with complete self-forgetfulness. Then the critic returned to explain why: They have force, feeling, scope, and form. The form is peculiar, decorated, precise, with a posture of thought akin to poetry.
