Alex Star – författare

In this crackling memoir, the journalist and novelist Michael Idov recounts the tempestuous years he spent living alongside - and closely observing - the media and cultural elite of Putin’s Russia. After accepting a surprise offer to become the editor in chief of GQ Russia, Idov and his family arrive in a Moscow still seething from a dubious election and the mass anti-Putin rallies that erupted in response. Idov is fascinated by the political turmoil but nonetheless finds himself pulled in unlikely directions. He becomes a tabloid celebrity, acts in a Russian movie with Snoop Dogg, befriends the members of Pussy Riot, punches an anti-Semitic magazine editor on the steps of the Bolshoi Theatre, sells an autobiographical sitcom pilot that is later changed into an anti-American farce, and writes Russia’s top-grossing domestic movie of 2015. Meanwhile, he becomes disillusioned with the splintering opposition to Putin and is briefly attracted to a kind of jaded Putinism lite - until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine thoroughly changes his mind.In Dressed Up for a Riot, Idov writes openly, sensitively, and stingingly about life in Moscow and his place in a media apparatus that sometimes undermined but more often bolstered a state system defined by cynicism, corruption, and the fanning of fake news. With humour and intelligence, he offers a close-up glimpse of what a declining world power can become.

I felt the panic begin to creep up inside me as I took inventory of myself and my surroundings. I didn't know where I was, or where Vivian was, I don't know what character I'm playing nor what the goal of this book is. I'm going to be stuck in this book forever. Nobody is going to know where I am, and nobody will think to look for me in the book on the counter. I'm going to die here.In the small town of Amberwick, Lydia is just your average specialized librarian. She spends her days going about her normal duties of sending off adventurers into specialized magic books, and she is content with that life, that is until she met Vivian. Vivian is everything Lydia wants to be, cool, strong, pretty, and an adventurer. Then, when accident strikes, and Lydia is sent into the kingdom of Starfall, her and Vivian must work together to get home before tragedy can befall them both.