Alleged abuse of staff by Netanyahu’s third wife opens him up to political attack. Billions of dollars in aid, bulging frequent-flier accounts for U.S. diplomats, and several thousand dead ought to be proof enough that the Middle East peace process has churned through the last decade and a half without getting anywhere.

But if you need more evidence, here it is: The Israeli Prime Minister’s wife is still allegedly screaming at her housekeeper. Read the rest of this entry »

Award-winning crime writer Matt Beynon Rees reads from THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, his new novel, Feb. 2 in New York.

The fourth installment in Matt’s Crime Writers Association Dagger-winning series about Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef is published Feb. 1. In New York for a UN conference, Omar uncovers an assassination plot. The suspect: his own son. Omar’s most personal investigation so far.

Matt will read from the book Feb. 2 at 7 p.m.
Location: Partners & Crime bookstore, 44 Greenwich Avenue (note, the bookstore is on Greenwich Avenue, not Greenwich Street), in Greenwich Village, NYC

Matt Beynon Rees is the award-winning author of the Omar Yussef series. A prize-winning journalist, he has reported for 14 years from the Middle East for Time, Newsweek and British newspapers. His novels have been translated into 23 languages. He lives in Jerusalem.

Read more about THE FOURTH ASSASSIN. Watch a video about the book. Order it from amazon.com or from amazon.co.uk. For publicity contact Grace McQuade (212) 446-5101 gmcquade@goldbergmcduffie.com

JERUSALEM, Israel — The American humorist Caskie Stinnett once wrote that “a diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip.” In other words, someone who doesn’t make his meaning so clear that one is both afraid of the trip to hell and angry about being sent there. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone comes back to Jerusalem. I don’t know why, I really don’t.

It’s too hot. The people can be offhandedly mean, and they drive as though they want to kill you. It isn’t a very pretty place once you look close. Oh and, yes, sometimes it gets violent. With shocking self-obsession, it thinks the eyes of the world are turned admiringly upon it all the time. Read the rest of this entry »

In the current Library Journal, my new Palestinian crime novel, THE FOURTH ASSASSIN (out Feb. 1) gets a very good review that highlights the themes and implications beyond the way detective Omar Yussef resolves the mystery. For those who didn’t yet get a copy of the magazine in the mail (Spoiler alert: Librarian of the Year is Craig Buthod of Louisville, Kentucky) here’s the review: “In New York City for a UN conference, Omar Yussef goes to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, home to a large Palestinian community, to visit his son and finds a beheaded body in his son’s apartment. With no alibi, his son is arrested, and Omar finds that the streets of New York are as treacherous and dangerous as those of Bethlehem. VERDICT Journalist Rees’s fourth Omar Yussef outing (after The Samaritan’s Secret) exposes the political struggle among various Palestinian factions and demonstrates why it is so difficult to find a solution in the troubled region. His sleuth might miss the ancient streets of Bethlehem, but the hatred and tension of the Middle East follow the Palestinian wherever he goes.”

The best thing about moving from journalism to fiction writing is that people show you more respect.

As a journalist covering a contentious issue like the Israel-Palestinian conflict, I was often subject to rather nasty verbal attacks during public speaking engagements. For a partisan of either side, I seemed a fine target for their generalized contempt—they thought journalists were all against them and here was a live reporter on whom they could vent their spleen.

Thankfully that doesn’t happen now that I’m the author of a series of Palestinian crime novels. I wasn’t sure that it would be different, but it turns out that there’s a big change in the way people behave toward me. Read the rest of this entry »

The Guardian asked me to contribute to their regular feature in which authors pick their top 10 novels on a particular subject. Read my top 10 novels set in the Arab world here. Most of the writers I picked are Arab, though there are a couple of Westerners and Tariq Ali is a Pakistani. This, by the way, is what I wrote in introducing the list:

“The Arab literary world and Western publishing don’t cross over much. The literature of the Arab world is largely unknown in the west, and even westerners who write about Arabs are sometimes seen as fringe, cult writers. That comes at a cost to the west, because literature could be such an important bridge between two cultures so much at odds. What we see of the Arab world comes from news reports of war and other madness. Literature would be a much more profound contact.

“I live in Jerusalem and write fiction about the Palestinians because it’s a better way to understand the reality of life in Palestine than journalism and non-fiction. The books in this list, in their different ways, unveil elements of life across the Arab world that you won’t see in the newspaper or on TV.”

Marwan Barghouti, serving five life sentences in an Israeli jail, is a key sticking point in negotiations between Israel and Hamas over kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit. (I posted this on Global Post.)

The most important man in Palestinian politics is neither president nor prime minister. He doesn’t shuttle between meetings at the U.S. ambassador’s residence and the Israeli foreign ministry. In fact, he doesn’t go anywhere. He’s in an Israeli jail. Read the rest of this entry »

Laura Hruska, Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Soho Press, died Saturday in her home in Manhattan. She was 74.

In 1986, Laura, her husband, Alan Hruska, and their friend Juris Jurjevics, the former Editor-in-Chief of The Dial Press, founded Soho Press with the intention of publishing quality books that the larger houses refused to take a chance on. Concerned at many publishers’ increased emphasis on marketing and sales, Laura decided that the time seemed right for “swimming against the tide.”

During her tenure at Soho, Laura launched the careers of many prominent writers, including Edwidge Danticat, whose novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory (selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club) began as a short story submitted to Laura while Ms. Danticat was a graduate student at Brown. Other notable Soho authors have included Dan Fesperman, Robert Hellenga, Susan Richards, Garth Stein, and Jacqueline Winspear.

As a lifelong lover of mysteries, Laura launched Soho Crime in 1994. The imprint offers literary mysteries set almost exclusively overseas, by authors including Cara Black, Rebecca Pawel, Peter Lovesey and Qiu Xiaolong. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have called Soho one of the leading publishers of exotic crime fiction in the United States.

In 2008, Soho, which now publishes between 60 and 80 titles a year, added a third imprint, Soho Constable, which offers crime novels originated by the British publisher Constable & Robinson.

Laura graduated from Cornell and Yale Law School and began her career with the law firm Royall Koegel & Rogers, where she worked as a litigator for six years before leaving to raise her children and pursue a writing career.

In 1976, Dutton published two of her novels, A Change of Heart and Legal Relations under the pen name Laura Chapman, and in 1978, Doubleday published her third novel, Multiple Choice.

As of January 1st, 2010, Bronwen Hruska, Laura’s daughter, assumed the duties of Publisher of Soho Press. Bronwen joined Soho Press in 2008 as the Associate Publisher. All of us here are looking forward to carrying on the legacy, and the editorial integrity, to which Laura devoted so much of her life.

Not long ago a friend of mine commented that my travels to promote my books must be a great pleasure to me. “You just have to talk about yourself,” he sneered. “You must like that.”

I ignored the implied insult (until now). But it struck me that people might think book tours are literally ego-trips. Wrong on two counts. Read the rest of this entry »