The Executioner’s Son, Suzdal, NE Russia, early 1950s
On a spring day in 1953 on Illian Meadow across the Kamenka River and beneath the walls of the Suzdahl Kremlin, Danton Larionov, son of the NKVD executioner and a bully, spies the stranger, fourteen-year-old Ekaterina Soroka, daughter of the dancer and a storyteller....Ледоход (Spirit Falls in Russian)
Spirit Falls – Ледоход My long time, Merrill, Wisconsin, friend Serge Kotlar has been translating my Cold War inter-connected series of novels into Russian. The first volume, Spirit Falls (Ледоход in Russian) is now available in print and electronic...
Что Делать? What is to be done?
Nickolai Chernyshevski and Vladimir Lenin wrote essays fretting over What is to be done? As do I; fret, that is. Their ambition was to remake Russia; mine is somewhat less, merely to tell you what my plans are, or specifically, what I will publish over the next two...
Publisher and Writer – Landowner and Serf
I’ve spent a great deal of time composing this blog because I am writing a scene, time frame 1961, in which two young men, Rick Belisle and Andrei Byelenko, minor league baseball hopefuls and sons of Slavic immigrants, are discussing in context of their...Misdirection
You don’t have to fool all of the people all of the time; you just have to fool the right people some of the time. (folk wisdom) On June 18 (1941) Timoshenko and Zhukov tried once again to persuade Stalin and the Politburo to put the Army on full alert. The more...Featured Books
Ледоход/Spirit Falls (Dual Language Russian-English)
Ледоход/Spirit Falls provides a dual-language facing page paperback suitable for either Russian- or English-language students, the first novel in Robert Townsend's Long War Series.In 1947, the Soviet security services named the United States as 'the main enemy.’ The Cold War was joined. Four teens, born half-worlds apart, children of their nations' greatest generation, come of age in the 1950s, each in their small-town Eden, cast out to encounter one another on the front lines in the war for control of the imagination.
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