If you’ve ever slathered your skin in the healing, mineral-rich mud of the Dead Sea, you may want to stop reading now.

More than 8 million gallons of sewage from East Jerusalem is pumped downhill to the Dead Sea, raw and untreated, every day. That’s not just a little icky for those of us who like to float in the lowest body of water on earth. It’s also an environmental catastrophe, and potentially another flashpoint in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

“It’s the greatest environmental hazard in the country,” said Naomi Tzur, Jerusalem’s deputy mayor, who heads the planning and environmental committees on the city council. “I don’t sleep easily at night knowing that this is happening.”

The Dead Sea is one of the contenders to be named among the Seven Natural Wonders of the World in an online poll that organizers estimate will draw a billion voters by the time results are announced next year. But its location also puts it in the firing line of a conflict almost as bitter as the sea’s highly saline water.

In 1993, the German government offered to finance a sewage-treatment plant for East Jerusalem. The plant was to be run jointly by Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which was founded that year as part of the Oslo Accords. The Palestinians refused to accept a joint project because they didn’t want to recognize any Israeli authority over the territory occupied since 1967.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

I was under the impression that the English weren’t allowed into Wales any more, now that Tony Blair persuaded us we ought to have at least half a government of our own and let Westminster pay for it. I assume Colin Cotterill managed to make it through the border undercover on his Australian passport. Which is a good thing, because his blog post of this week was a lovely appreciations of my homeland, even down to the 28 yards of daily rainfall for which I yearn as I swelter through 40-degree desert heat here in Jerusalem.

During his stay at the Hay-on-Wye Book Festival, Colin muses that a soggy sheep would be less attractive than a dry one. A dry sheep may conjure up pleasanter images of romantic moments in the haybarn (in a land where there are more sheep than humans, romance might occasionally include a sheep.) There is, however, considerable lanolin in the sheep’s wool, so the rainfall doesn’t penetrate to the sheep’s body and therefore a good shake would be all that’s needed to dry him or her out – for further investigation, as it were.

Read the rest of this post at my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

JERUSALEM — Time was anyone with an interest in the Middle East could be guaranteed a couple of books a year would be brought out by U.S. journalists based in the region. Now many of those correspondents are history, with news bureaus closing and those that remain cutting back. The new books written by Americans tend to be by think-tank types or others whose agenda is hard to figure out.

But you know that already. It’s one reason you’re reading GlobalPost, which was founded partially to replace the disappearing corps of U.S. foreign correspondents. [That's where I first posted this.]

So GlobalPost has solved your journalism problem. But, still, what’re you going to do about the books? With a book written by a foreign correspondent you couldn’t always be sure of a good read —I’ve ploughed through some stinky “notebook dumps” in my time by reporters who padded pages with meaningless tales of their Palestinian and Israeli “friends” — but you at least knew that it was by a responsible journalist answerable to editors and readers even for his extracurricular writings. Not so with think-tank academics whose financing and agenda can make for deeply skewed accounts.

The answer: Europeans. A new book demonstrates what I’m talking about.

“Hold onto Your Veil, Fatima!” is an expose of contemporary Egypt that’s at once harrowing and humorous by Sanna Negus, a reporter for Finland’s YLE Radio and TV.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

The company you keep can put the culture around you in a new light, let you see it as you haven’t before.

That’s true when I travel to different countries and discover that readers in Germany have a particular take on my Palestinian crime novels which differs from the way they look to Americans, for example.

I got to thinking about this when I was wandering the Nablus casbah this week with two German friends. An enthusiastic Palestinian fellow asked me to explain to them how much he appreciated Hitler, and as an afterthought he noted that all his people’s problems are caused by me and my compatriots from the British Isles.

I had just climbed up the old Turkish clocktower in Manara Square at the heart of the casbah with one of the Germans. I’d never seen the door at the bottom open before, but there was a policeman inside on this occasion and he generously allowed us to go up the ladder. On the first balcony, I stepped through more pigeon feces than I’d have thought could possibly gather in one place. It was crusty for the depth of an inch or two, then a little slushy beneath. I had a grin all over my face of the kind that tends to appear there when I discover a new corner in a place I’ve often been – and loved being there – before.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

Soho publishes two new hardcovers a month: one international detective novel for Soho Crime, and one literary novel or memoir for Soho Press. When I started in May, Ailen, the Marketing Director, slipped me a shiny new copy of Lisa Brackmann’s Rock Paper Tiger, the story of Ellie, a 26-year-old Iraq vet living in China. Ellie’s good friend, a Chinese political artist, disappears under very shady circumstances. Suddenly, Ellie is being followed everywhere by menacing guys in suits, and she finds herself on a trek across China trying to escape her strange stalkers, find her missing friend, and figure out what the heck is going on.

“If you want to get to know Soho, this is a good place to start reading,” Ailen told me. “This book is coming out soon. I’m really excited about it.”

I’d heard a lot about Lisa and the book–I’d seen the starred PW review, first of all, and noticed that the book took place in China. As a gal who can’t read enough about China, both fiction or nonfiction, Lisa’s edgy, journalistic-slash-adventurer approach seemed very appealing. Tasty, I’d go as far as to say. Full of dumplings. Literally. I was not disappointed.

Ailen loves the book for a different reason–the gaming component. I have to admit this is the only literary novel I’ve read in which one of the characters retreats into an online game world, and boy does Lisa Brackmann succeed in creating a very tense real-world/virtual adventure.

Rock Paper Tiger is both innovative and very entertaining, the kind of combination you hope for whenever you open a debut novel. For those of us (like me) who love us a satisfying story arc, RPT has a quest, a likable heroine with a number of conflicts, even (dare I say it?) a love story. Very serious readers will be equally rewarded, though.

“RPT grew out of two impulses,” Lisa says. “One was to comment on the War On Terror and the Iraq War, which I felt very strongly about. The other was to set a book in contemporary China, which I felt had been underutilized in current Western fiction.”

It’s true that Lisa’s “utilization” of China goes in a direction I’ve never seen before, and found very engaging. RPT doesn’t fit the genre rules of most American novels that take place in China or feature Chinese characters. Lisa’s take is richer, more nuanced, and friendlier–Ellie, her main character, is American, yes, but Ellie is at home in China. She’s not an outsider looking in. She’s a girl on a quest to help her friends.

The War On Terror element is another part of the story that makes the book valuable. RPT reminds us that America’s war has affected different parts of the globe in weird ways–cooperation with America, Lisa tells me, has been a great excuse for the Chinese government to work toward suppressing their own “ethnic minorities” (in a country made up of literally dozens of racial and ethnic groups), particularly the Muslim Uighurs of Xinjiang province and the Tibetan population in the western provinces.

Reading Rock Paper Tiger made me happy–both on the levels of having myself a very happy literary experience (um, and at least 3 plates of dumplings over the course of the reading), and because it made me realize that I worked at a press that liked to publish the kinds of stuff I was into, the kinds of stuff I believed in. Good writing, social consciousness, edgy fiction by a female author? Check, check, and check. I’m happy.

[Juliet's getting to know Soho, one book at a time. She will always take recommendations about what she should read next!]

Their politics might be spinning wheels, but Palestinians are revving engines on the race track.
NABLUS, West Bank — For a change, the Palestinians gathered on the main street of Nablus were happy to be going around in circles.

Palestinian politics makes a lot of noise, only to end up spinning its wheels, moving no closer to statehood or peace. But the same combination on the race track is attracting growing attention for the Palestinian Motor Sport circuit.

“I love racing and I love speed,” said Suna Aweideh, the 39-year-old driver from Jerusalem who has become known as “Queen of the Car Races.” “It’s exciting for our people.”

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

So I’ve been at Soho for a month now–yesterday was my official one-month anniversary. Due to the unfortunate alignment of BEA (Book Expo America, the hugest American trade publishing show and a happy but chaotic annual stress-fest for everyone involved) a lot of this month has been tied up in meeting people and generally running amok.

But now that things are settling down for the summer, I’m looking forward to acquainting myself with the Soho list, one author at a time. The Soho Crime series are particularly exciting for me to dip into, since in many cases I’m going to be working with some of our long-time authors myself.

I hope you long-time Soho fans will check in and comment if I touch upon books you’ve read. Also, if you know the list really well already, I look forward to your recommendations. I’m going to tackle a book a week, so let me know if you have a particular favorite and I’ll bump it up on my list!

Juliet
Still Newish Editor
Desk by the Air Conditioner
Soho Press, New York

“There is no such thing as human history,” according to the 19th century historian John Lothrop Motley. Addressing the New York Historical Society in 1868, he stated that all we possess is “a leaf or two from the great book of human fate as it flutters in stormwinds ever sweeping across the earth. We decipher them as best we can with purblind eyes, and endeavor to learn their mystery as we float along to the abyss; but it is all confused babble….”
Motley was referring to the inability of moderns to fully understand the past, to leave behind their own preconceptions of that past, as well as their own grounding in contemporary times. Motley, known for his in-depth histories of the Netherlands, was not surprisingly also the author of two popular novels about America’s colonial past.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. referred to Motley in his famous paper “History and National Stupidity”, published in the New York Review of Books in 2006. “History is not self-executing,” Schlesinger said. “You do not put a coin in a slot and have history come out…the past is a chaos of events and personalities into which we cannot penetrate. It is beyond retrieval and it is beyond reconstruction.”
Beyond retrieval. Yet professional historians keep writing books about Lincoln, about Rome, the American Revolution, about the great devils of history and the fewer angels who inhabit the past.
Writers of fiction labor at history too, in their own way, illuminating the past not through footnotes and the global view, but from the viewpoint of characters, giving modern readers ancient eyes with which to see the through those stormwinds of history. Just as historians may bring their own biases and limitations to their work, so may writers of historical fiction. In historical fiction, I believe such mistakes can be more evident, giving the reader a clearer understanding of the writer’s faults and agenda.
A culture or society must know and come to understand its past, just as a person needs to know where they came from, the story of their life, their parent’s lives and the lives of others who came before. If we fail, as a society or a person, to understand our past, either as a legend or the objective truth, we stand on crumbling ground as we try to move forward.
As a writer of historical fiction, I make up a lot of things. But the core of the story, the sense of when at the heart of the novel, that remains sacred ground. That is the place I try to go and see with ancient eyes. It has happened to me once in my life, that I truly saw with those eyes. It was September 12, 2001. I stood outside, gazing up at the empty blue sky, and realized that for the first time in my life, I didn’t know what was going to happen next. I was adrift, and felt a kinship with my fictional character, Billy Boyle, going off to war in 1942. They didn’t know what was going to happen next, either. All the history I’d read had not prepared me for that simple truth. As a matter of fact, it disguised that truth by giving me the outcome to every great battle and struggle of history, telling me a story that blinded me to the essential human drama. The wondering, what will become of me? Of those I love? Of my country?
I always thought he was joking, but now I understand what Oscar Wilde meant when he said, “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”

Rag And Bone, the fifth Billy Boyle mystery, will be released September 1, 2010.
For the full text of Arthur Schlesinger’s remarks, see: http://tiny.cc/dxfv3

The women of the Middle East are about to save me from the greatest banality known to man. I’m counting on them to care as little about the the World Cup as I do and to keep me entertained until men can once again talk about something other than Wayne Rooney’s groin.

Though I’ve long loved to play soccer, I scorn the watching of its endless buildup passes, the constant disappointment of a game which can be won with a single lucky goal, the sport’s failure to rein in rampant cheating and other pathetic behavior by its pampered players.

George Orwell wrote that international sports – and he meant, mainly, soccer – was a disgusting tribal experience that was intended to keep us filled with nationalistic hate until it was time to have an actual war and go off to kill each other again in earnest. Living in the Middle East, where nationalism is such an incendiary factor and is so often in bloody evidence, I find I have no tolerance for the stupidity of sporting nationalism.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

MASADA, Israel — A parade of bejeweled camels, elaborately costumed warriors and prancing horses crossed the stage. Jerusalem had fallen to a conqueror from the east. The high priest predicted disaster and the wrath of a vengeful deity. Three hours later, with searchlights flitting across the rugged face of this ancient fortress, the Jews were freed, the conqueror stood in awe of the God of the Jews, and, oh yes, a fat lady sang.

The Israeli Opera last weekend staged the opening performances of its “Nabucco,” Giuseppe Verdi’s first great success from 1842, around about where the Romans camped in A.D. 73 when they besieged the 1,300-foot heights of Masada. The company, which is based in Tel Aviv, intends this extravaganza to inaugurate a new annual outdoor opera festival. (There’s also a performance by the great American soprano Jessye Norman, whose services, it should be noted, do not come cheap.)

It might seem a risky proposition to start an annual outdoor opera festival at a time when Israel is isolated not only politically but, increasingly, in the cultural sphere. Pressure from boycott campaigners persuaded Elvis Costello last month to cancel open-air concerts at another historic venue — the Roman amphitheater in Caesarea. This week, alternative rockers The Pixies joined Carlos Santana and Gil Scott-Heron in pulling out of shows in Israel. Pro-boycott protesters have turned their attention to other performers with dates scheduled for Israel this summer, including Elton John.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.