This week`s contents page

CULTURAL STUDIES
3
Michael Saler
Terri Apter
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
Telephone: 020 7782 5000
Fax: 020 7782 4966
[email protected]
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
6
LITERATURE
7
Putin’s foreign policy, Eric Korn, John Evelyn’s poems, etc
Morris Dickstein
Paula Byrne
Robert Archer
B
ernard Malamud’s reputation as a writer
was falling before he died in 1986 and has
risen only a little since. This week Morris
Dickstein reviews his novels and short stories
from the 1940s to the 1960s, newly collected
by Library of America, asking why Malamud’s “virtues of craft” and “long reach of
moral imagination” have left his legacy so
“precarious”. Dickstein’s answers include the
author’s fierce protection of his privacy, his
prose style and a deep pessimism that ill fitted
the tenor of his times. Membership of a troika
alongside Saul Bellow and Philip Roth did not
help.
Malamud’s family had fled from the persecution of Jews in Russia, the subject of one his
finest works, The Fixer. Bernard Wasserstein
reviews two books about the shtetl, the small
settlements that inspired Fiddler on the Roof,
where, in total, 8 million Jews once lived.
Despite fears of “yet another nostalgia trip to
Yiddishland”, he finds a serious analysis by
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern (pictured) of the
shtetl in its golden age, from book publishing
in Hebrew to the liquor trade. A cultural history by Jeffrey Shandler is too much “an exercise in mediating the mediators”.
Michael Saler examines the mythology of
the Dark Net, that hidden zone of life online
that has been recently much reported by journalists on the side of the light. He notes how
Jamie Bartlett, “an informed guide for the armchair explorer”, finds drug dealers and pornographers there but also “competitive prices
and cheerful customer service”; it is a mirror
image of ourselves from which we have much
to learn. Terri Apter discusses digital guides to
parenting: “how can I tell if my child is enticed
into illegal activities while apparently safe at
home?” Anna Katharina Schaffner considers
the idea of “Generation Twee”, in which the
current vogue for televised cake-baking is part
of a yearning for “perma-childhood”.
The writings of the young Jane Austen were
“violent, restless, anarchic and exuberantly
expressionistic”, Kathryn Sutherland writes in
her introduction to Jane’s juvenilia; “female
brawling, sexual misdemeanour and murder
run riot across their pages”. Paula Byrne
praises “a splendid new edition”.
HISTORY
11
Jamie Bartlett The Dark Net – Inside the digital underworld. Gabriella
Coleman Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy – The story of
Anonymous. Julian Assange – When Google Met Wikileaks
Howard Gardner and Katie Davis The App Generation – How today’s
youth navigate identity, intimacy, and imagination in a digital world.
Lynn Schofield Clark The Parent App – Understanding families in the
digital age
Bernard Wasserstein
Bernard Malamud Novels and Stories of the 1940s & 50s. Novels and
Stories of the 1960s
Jane Austen Volume the First. Volume the Second. Volume the Third;
Edited by Kathryn Sutherland. Love and Freindship and Other Youthful
Writings; Edited by Christine Alexander
Josep Pla The Gray Notebook; Translated by Peter Bush
Mark Greengrass
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern The Golden Age Shtetl – A new history of
Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Jeffrey Shandler Shtetl – A vernacular
intellectual history
Joseph Bergin The Politics of Religion in Early Modern France
Swimming for Beginners
Rings
POEMS
12
25
Stephen Knight
Andrew McCulloch
SOCIAL STUDIES
13
Anna Katharina Schaffner Marc Spitz Twee – The gentle revolution in music, books, television,
fashion and film
COMMENTARY
14
Nicholas Vincent
Benjamin George
Friedman
Then & Now
In plain view – The Sandwich Magna Carta – and others
Freelance
Patrick McCaughey
Madame Cézanne (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Dita
Amory et al Madame Cézanne
Viollet-le-Duc – Les visions d’un architecte (Cité de l’Architecture et du
Patrimoine, Palais Chaillot, Paris). Laurence de Finance and JeanMichel Leniaud, editors Viollet-le-Duc – Les visions d’un architecte
Zinnie Harris How To Hold Your Breath (Royal Court Theatre)
ARTS
17
Andrew Saint
Mika Ross-Southall
FICTION
19
Gwendoline Riley
Michael LaPointe
Paul Griffiths
Claire Lowdon
Josh Glancy
TLS October 16, 1969 – Framing Malamud
Ruth Morse
Elizabeth Harrower In Certain Circles
Adam Thirlwell Lurid & Cute
Jeremy M. Davies Fancy
Tommy Wieringa These Are the Names; Translated by Sam Garrett
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen One Night, Markovitch; Translated by Sondra
Silverston
Karim Miské Arab Jazz; Translated by Sam Gordon
POETRY & MEMOIRS
22
Lachlan Mackinnon
John Burnside All One Breath. I Put a Spell on You
ART HISTORY &
BIOGRAPHY
23
Gillian Tindall
Anne Sinclair My Grandfather’s Gallery – A legendary art dealer’s
escape from Vichy France; Translated by Shaun Whiteside
S. N. Behrman Duveen – The story of the most spectacular art dealer of
all time
MUSIC
24
IN BRIEF
26
RELIGION
28
Stefan C. Reif
Harry Freedman The Talmud – A biography. Moulie Vidas Tradition
and the Formation of the Talmud
CULTURAL STUDIES
29
Julian Preece
Kate Elswit Watching Weimar Dance. Michael H. Kater Weimar –
From Enlightenment to the present
James Ward Adventures in Stationery – A journey through your pencil
case
Bruce Boucher
Michael Haas
Laura Ashe and Ian Patterson, editors War and Literature, etc
Catharine Morris
This week’s contributors, Crossword
31
NB
32
Julie Brown Schoenberg and Redemption. Joy H. Calico Arnold
Schoenberg’s ‘A Survivor from Warsaw’ in Postwar Europe
J. C.
Hopkins in Scots, the TLS murder case, Blurb-babble
Cover image: Binary computer code © Paul Fleet/Alamy; p2 © Estelle A. Ure, Northwestern University; p3 © David Cheskin/PA; p4 © Luke MacGregor/Reuters;
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TLS FEBRUARY 20 2015