Still Talking: Stories

Description

“For almost six decades Segal has quietly produced some of the best fiction and essays in American literature…”–The New York Times

In this eagerly awaited follow-up to Ladies’ Lunch, the beloved New Yorker writer Lore Segal’s returns with her final collection stories of the old friends who have loved and lunched together for over 40 years . . .

“Segal writes with welcome clarity about life’s final years, and if her characters are not always as wise as they think they are, Segal eyes them all with the unsentimental wisdom of a life spent writing wondrous stories and essays, a career spent telling the truth.”–Slate

Lore Segal was a master of the short story, and this collection shows her in peak form. Profound, dark, and often hilarious, Segal portrays her characters foibles, eccentricities and passions with great compassion and exactness, as they grapple with life, aging, and each other.

Readers of Ladies Lunch will recognize the educated, urbane nonagenarian women who have been friends for a lifetime, as they tackle aging’s affronts with wit, grace and resourcefulness.

With an Introduction by Vivian Gornick
Binding Type: Paperback
Contributors: Lore Segal,Vivian Gornick (Introduction by)
Published: 03/17/2026
Publisher: Melville House Publishing
ISBN: 9781685892517
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 0.56″ H x 8.20″ L x 5.44″ W

About the Author
Lore Segal (1928 – 2024) was the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Shakespeare’s Kitchen, as well as the novels Half the Kingdom, Lucinella, Other People’s Houses, Her First American and the collection The Journal I Did Not Keep. Her story collection Ladies Lunch was a New Yorker book of the Year.

Segal received the American Academy Arts and Letters Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, The O’Henry Prize and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize. Her work appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, and numerous other publications. In 2023, Segal was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Vivian Gornick is a writer and critic whose work has received two National Book Critics Circle Award nominations and been collected in The Best American Essays 2014. Her works include the memoirs Fierce Attachments–ranked the best memoir of the last fifty years by the New York Times—The Odd Woman and the City, and Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader, as well as the classic text on writing, The Situation and the Story.