Her First American
A Novel
$39.54
- Paperback
368 pages
- Release Date
5 March 2026
Summary
A fortieth-anniversary edition of the unforgettable, eccentric ‘truly original novel’, an evocative tale of race, romance, and the complexities of the human experience, by the Pulitzer Prize finalist.
She’s Ilka Weissnix, a young Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Europe, newly arrived in the United States. He’s Carter Bayoux, her first American: a middle-aged, hard-drinking Black intellectual. At first, their relationship is fuelled by lust, but also by a shared sense of displacement, with…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9798893850505 |
|---|---|
| Author: | Lore Segal, Jeffrey Renard Allen |
| Publisher: | The New Press |
| Imprint: | The New Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 368 |
| Release Date: | 5 March 2026 |
| Dimensions: | 139mm x 215mm |
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Critics Review
“[A] highly original mixture of drollery and catastrophe… . Her First American sneaks up on you. What begins as the comic adventures of a greenhorn ends up distilling the ironies and poignancies of Jewish-Black relations in America.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A wonderful novel … Her First American is boldly comic and full of startling scenes—to read it is to be exhilarated. It’s also the kind of incredibly rich book that can make a reader pause and examine his beliefs about racism, religion, the Three Stooges, and most of all—America the amazing.”
—People
“Charm, warmth, humor, and a completely unsentimental compassion are exactly what Segal provides in this bittersweet, idiosyncratic love story… . A truly original novel.”
—Newsday
“A quiet, funny, slyly affecting novel—one that always remains under delicate control while seeming to teeter on the edge of preciousness or sentimentality.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Segal’s best book… . A complex, funny, plangently sorrowful Pygmalion story.”
—The Wall Street Journal
Lore Segal
Lore Segal (1928–2024) was the author of Other People’s Houses and Shakespeare’s Kitchen, among other works. Shakespeare’s Kitchen was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Segal was the recipient of a New Yorker Best Book of the Year Award, an O. Henry Prize, the Clifton Fadiman Medal, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Republic.
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