“How angry am I? You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.”
The idea for writing a modern version of the biblical story of Joseph came apparently from the author’s husband. It is a brilliant one, even more brilliantly executed
A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED by Dara Horn
GOVERNMENT IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR THE THINGS WE CHOOSE TO DO TOGETHER: Columbus Officer Forced Women to Have Sex ‘For Their Freedom,’ Prosecutors Say.
GOVERNMENT IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR THE THINGS WE CHOOSE TO DO TOGETHER: Columbus Officer Forced Women to Have Sex ‘For Their Freedom,’ Prosecutors Say.
Man charged after arrow fired from bow pierces resident's mobile phone
The tall tale about a bible in a soldier's pocket saving his life during the war after it blocked a bullet has been given a modern twist.
One of the many Pleasings of the scribbles became apparent a few days ago when a book group in Newbury very kindly sent me a copy of Forty Autumns, a book they had all loved. I opened it to read the first few pages at breakfast time and before I knew it it was lunch time. Much more about this superb and moving account of the human, social and political impact of life in East Germany after the war very soon. How little I really knew and how prescient it remains as a warning of the threats and dangers of extremism, misuse of power and unchallengeable control in our own time.
Now we are a teenager... And reading about the Iron Curtain
We live in spooky times, and writers are worried. Books for 2018 tackle North Korea, climate change, and the plight of the refugee, including a Manus story written on a smuggled cell phone.
A former US president has co-written The President is Missing, but fortunately that's fiction. For comfort, publishers are offering us detective stories and thrillers, inspiring memoirs, dramatic debuts and a novel narrated by a galah.
It's a long way from Zhukovka to Canberra - The Australian
Now we are a teenager... And reading about the Iron Curtain
Former NSW premier Bob Carr is facing demands he be expelled from Labor because of his links to China, a sign
A former US president has co-written The President is Missing, but fortunately that's fiction. For comfort, publishers are offering us detective stories and thrillers, inspiring memoirs, dramatic debuts and a novel narrated by a galah.
It's a long way from Zhukovka to Canberra - The Australian
The dinner in John Tesarsch's novel is amazing. Not because of the food, of which little mention is made (in Soviet times it was usually unmentionable), nor because of the endless stream of ...
How the KGB Weaponized Fake News (and How It’s Still Hurting Us Today)
The US government created HIV. The CIA killed Kennedy. The KGB deliberately spread disinformation designed to hurt the US and its allies for decades. In this excellent three-part video series from the NY Times, they show how this KBG program worked and how, under Vladimir Putin, it continues to affect world politics.
The Politics of Love: Review of Dinner with the Dissidents by John Tesarsch. August 28, 2018. It's 1970 in Soviet Russia, and people are beginning to question the communist regime. The Kremlin is struggling to quell the ...
Last December, a comment from a reader called Robin reminded me that I had a copy of John Tesarsch’s Dinner with the Dissidents and on her recommendation, I moved it up the TBR. Unsurprisingly, since I’ve read and liked Tesarsch before, the book turned out to be interesting reading, with a pertinent take-home message for our time…
The Politics of Writing: Guest Post by John Tesarsch
My third novel, Dinner with the Dissidents, is set mainly in Soviet Russia in 1971. It is about a struggling young novelist, Leonid Krasnov, who is approached by the KGB with the promise they will make him a literary star. On one condition: that he agrees to infiltrate the inner circle of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the famous writer and dissident, and spy on him. At first, Leonid complies. But when he falls in love with a dissident musician, his allegiances waver. By then he is enmeshed in a plot more sinister than he could ever have imagined.
When I began to write this novel, I was daunted by various challenges. Although it is a work of fiction, certain historical personages feature prominently: the legendary cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya; the composer Dmitri Shostakovich; Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear physicist turned dissident; and Solzhenitsyn himself. How much liberty could I allow myself with such venerated figures? And despite my lifelong love of Russian music and literature, how could I (brought up in an outer suburb of Melbourne, on a subdivided apple orchard) expect to understand the mysteries of the mythical Russian psyche?
As it turned out, however, the most delicate artistic question that I faced when writing the novel was raised by a parallel Australian storyline.
Many years later, Leonid is a public servant in Canberra, having emigrated to Australia under a false name. I figured this would be a suitable aperture through which he could view, and reflect on, his misadventures, and possibly even make amends. It would also give his story more immediacy, and currency, for Western readers. That said, I was perplexed by how the Australian chapters could enable readers to reflect on the relevance of Leonid’s travails to their own lives, without the novel becoming didactic.
The Politics of writing guest post by John Tesarsch
The Politics of writing guest post by John Tesarsch
Last December, a comment from a reader called Robin reminded me that I had a copy of John Tesarsch’s Dinner with the Dissidents and on her recommendation, I moved it up the TBR. Unsurprisingly, since I’ve read and liked Tesarsch before, the book turned out to be interesting reading, with a pertinent take-home message for our time… 
