In The Jacksonian, Beth Henley returns to the Southern Gothic storytelling that made her reputation with both critics and audiences. Set in a seedy motel in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964, the play centers around Rosy, a troubled teenager, and Bill, her dentist father who has been living at the motel for several months as his wife, Susan, considers the disgrace of divorce. Fred, the motel bartender, and Eva, a waitress, are locked in a gruesome pact: he’ll marry her if she agrees to help him evade punishment for a hideous crime. But Bill, turning to nitrous oxide to ease the pain of his life collapsing around him, is a convenient target for Eva’s desperate desire for companionship. At the height of the violence associated with the civil rights movement, these characters gradually reveal the shameful secrets and psychological turmoil just beneath the surface of their insistent Southern gentility.
Studies of Eastern European literature have largely confined themselves to a single language, culture, or nationality. In this highly original book, Glaser shows how writers working in Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish during much of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century were in intense conversation with one another. The marketplace was both the literal locale at which members of these different societies and cultures interacted with one another and a rich subject for representation in their art. It is commonplace to note the influence of Gogol on Russian literature, but Glaser shows him to have been a profound influence on Ukrainian and Yiddish literature as well. And she shows how Gogol must be understood not only within the context of his adopted city of St. Petersburg but also that of his native Ukraine. As Ukrainian and Yiddish literatures developed over this period, they were shaped by their geographical and cultural position on the margins of the Russian Empire. As distinctive as these writers may seem from one another, they are further illuminated by an appreciation of their common relationship to Russia. Glaser’s book paints a far more complicated portrait than scholars have traditionally allowed of Jewish (particularly Yiddish) literature in the context of Eastern European and Russian culture.
Just Assassins is an engrossing collection of fourteen original essays that illuminate terrorism as it has occurred in Russian culture past and present. The broad range of writers and scholars have contributed work that examines Russian literature, film, and theater; historical narrative; and even amateur memoir, songs, and poetry posted on the Internet. Along with editor Anthony Anemone’s introduction, these essays chart the evolution of modern political terrorism in Russia, from the Decembrist uprising to the horrific school siege in Beslan in 2004.
As terrorism and the fear of terrorism continues to animate, shape, and deform public policy and international relations across the globe, Just Assassins brings into focus how Russia’s cultural engagement with its legacy of terrorism offers instructive lessons and insights for anyone concerned about political terror.
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