bethlehem | bethlehem
Mar.31.2011
I lifted the spray can and wrote a big, blue P. The letter bled and blurred. "Oh, I messed it up," I said. “Spray closer to the wall, Matt,” my friend Walid told me. No problem. I just moved onto the next section of concrete. Unfortunately, there’s plenty of wall.Miles and miles of it, in...
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Dec.30.2010
My new book MOZART’S LAST ARIA will be out in the UK in May. Naturally this means a revamp for my website (coming soon) and a new promo video (coming about the same time) to be posted to Youtube. You know, all the stuff writers actually get into the business of writing in order to do. That, and...
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Dec.25.2010
For the first time in years, the people of Bethlehem have something more to celebrate at Christmas than the recollection of an important birth in their town 2,000 years ago.After the city’s economy was devastated by the Palestinian intifada over the last decade, Bethlehem’s economic recovery has...
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Dec.13.2010
ST. GEORGE’S MONASTERY, West Bank — Gathered in the chapel of this outpost in the Judean Desert last week, the Orthodox priests chanted “Lord, have mercy” in Greek, in a service of blessing for a new road that makes the venerable building accessible to the growing number of tourists willing to dare...
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Nov.23.2010
Superfragilistic Amniotic Intercourse
Title hardly makes any sense, right? Wrong!
Attempting to decipher the rhyme or reason for things of potential global impact goes against the pall of rational thought that is of value to the human race. Kind of like calling an otter a threat to walruses.
Let's...
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Oct.13.2010
The crime novel tradition seems to have little connection to love. Maybe sometimes love in a perverse sense is the spur to the murder at the heart of most crime novels – the spurned husband killing his wife, for example. But usually the detective is a loveless loner, pining without much hope like...
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May.05.2010
BETHLEHEM, West Bank — The good news is that the West Bank is normal — kind of — and that people are content — sort of. The bad news, the Palestine Liberation Organization thinks it’s responsible for the good news.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who’s also the Palestine Liberation...
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Apr.16.2010
If there’s one thing that authoring a series of novels will teach you, it’s that you can’t wait for inspiration. But you can prompt it, give it little electric shocks that’ll keep it bubbling within you. Here are a few methods I use to do that.
I go to the places I’m writing about. I talk to people...
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Apr.02.2010
Since 9/11, journalists and writers have tried to understand the extremists committed to the destruction of the West and, often, that of their own societies in the Middle East. Writers have mostly done this by “going inside” the world of those extremists, giving us the inner life of suicide bombers...
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Feb.24.2010
The dead man's mother raged and cried as she told me how she’d discovered her son’s body, in the cabbage patch outside her home. She’d lowered herself onto her knees, she said, touched his blood and wiped her fingers on her face and called out that God is most great.
As the winter wind came cold...
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