the samaritan's secret | the samaritan's secret
Sep.02.2011
Eleanor Roosevelt said that no one can make you feel bad, except yourself. I live by that rule. Particularly when it comes to reviews. And double-particularly when it comes to online reviews.
A recent Cornell University study found that 85 percent of amazon.com’s “top reviewers” had received free...
|
Sep.09.2010
The “Golden Age” of the detective story was the 1920s and 1930s. It was a turbulent period. In Britain, the General Strike. In the U.S., the Depression. Civil war in Spain, and in Germany the rise of the Nazis. Red scares everywhere, fascists too.But the detective story was a solace to those who...
|
|
Apr.08.2010
No Palestinian state this week. Don’t really know why not. At this point I’d be happy to sign off on anything at all, just to get it off my hands. I’ve told the Americans that, but they seem convinced I’m some kind of hardliner—they think I’m bluffing when I say “Barry, where do I sign?” I think it...
|
Mar.25.2010
When you live in a foreign place, it can become home. Until eventually you forget quite how foreign it is.
Then you go to another foreign country, only to discover that it doesn’t seem so foreign. And you realize that the place you live actually IS extremely foreign.
That’s what happened to me...
|
|
Mar.16.2010
I was tucking into a slice of qanafi at my favorite vendor in the Nablus casbah yesterday when a gang of Palestinian reporters and officials intruded on my guilty pleasure. This was at Aqsa Sweets, which readers of THE SAMARITAN'S SECRET will know as the place favored by the hero of my Palestinian...
|
Feb.14.2010
My new Palestinian crime novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN is one of five "This Week's Hot Reads" on The Daily Beast, which also happens to be the hot read of the web these days. The Beast writes of the book and its Brooklyn setting: "Rees paints a meticulous portrait of the post-9/11...
|
|
Jan.19.2010
In the current Library Journal, my forthcoming Palestinian crime novel, THE FOURTH ASSASSIN (out Feb. 1) gets a good review that highlights the themes and implications beyond the solving of the mystery. For those who don't have a copy of the magazine (in which case you'll have missed the award for...
|
Dec.04.2009
The Samaritan's Secret, the third of my Palestinian crime novels, was named one of the Best Mystery Books of the Year for 2009 by <a href="http://www.deadlypleasures.com/index.html">Deadly Pleasures</a>, the crime fiction magazine with the best read on websites and what fans...
|
|
Dec.03.2009
When it comes to homosexuals, Palestinians have it all ass-backwards. That's why I introduced homosexuality as a theme of <a href="http://www.mattbeynonrees.com/nablus.htm">THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET</a>, my most recent Palestinian crime novel. I wanted to show how negative...
|
Sep.03.2009
UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph reports the discovery of a portion of a Bible from 350 AD in the library of the monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai. The Codex Sinaiticus is written in Greek on animal skin and the newspaper calls it "a fragment of the world's oldest bible." Well, I...
|