On Wednesday, Lore Segal read excerpts from her new novel, “Shakespeare’s Kitchen,” speaking with the easy confidence of an author of her distinction and experience.

“Anything can be turned into a piece of writing,” she said at the start of her reading.

Still, Segal life’s has offered more material than most. Sent on a British Kindertransport out of Vienna during WWII at the age of 10, she lived in England and the Dominican Republic before finally settling in the U.S. in 1951.

Since then Segal has written many well-received novels, including “Other People’s Houses” and “Her First American,” worked on several children’s books, and published numerous short stories in The New Yorker. She has translated a number of works and taught creative writing at a number of universities, among them Columbia University and Ohio State University.

She described her latest work, “Shakespeare’s Kitchen,” as a middle ground between a loosely-structured novel and a short story collection. The work focuses on happenings at a Connecticut think tank.

Segal read her dark and complex story “The Reverse Bug” in its entirety. The story portrays an ESL class that grapples with the legacies of state-sponsored cruelty in all its forms, from Dachau to Hiroshima to a host of secret government deportations.

In the story, the “reverse bug” is an acoustic invention that inverts the function of a typical listening device.

“The reverse bug, equally impossible to locate and deactivate, was a device that allowed those outside to relay into it what those inside would prefer not to hear,” Segal read.

After she finished reading, she looked at her audience and sighed.

“Now you’re all depressed,” she deadpanned, when no one raised their hands to ask questions.

Adjunct Professor of German Studies Vera Grant had another explanation for the audience’s momentary silence.

“It was so gripping that the whole audience was stunned,” she said. “The content was so powerful. She clearly has a political intent.”

The author, however, framed her intentions more generally.

“I’m interested in what does go on all the time as we go about our business,” Segal said.

Assistant Professor of English Matthew Sharpe, who introduced Segal as one of his early and favorite writing teachers, said at the reception that he’d learned a lot from the author.

“She taught me how to use fiction to ask serious questions about being a human being,” he said. “And also how to write a good sentence.”

During the reception after the reading, some students from Sharpe’s Techniques of Fiction writing class remained in the main room, where Segal was chatting with some professors.

“In class we’re studying the uses of the objective correlative, which is where an objective thing represents an emotion. In the story she just read, though, I didn’t catch any,” said Joe Newman ’10.

“In the story we read in class, she’s given a sausage by her mother right before she gets sent away from Vienna. She never eats it, and it rots, which takes on the qualities of tragedy,” said Kasey Wochna ’10.