little palestine | little palestine
May.18.2011
Crime novelists generally write a novel a year. It’s what publishers want. Some big writers—and I mean, 25 million books sold—have told me their publishers and agents complain that if they don’t produce a book a year their readers will forget them.
In the case of such writers, some of those 25...
|
Mar.07.2010
Kingsley Amis said that “a bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn’t allow it to spoil your lunch.” That’s because Kingsley, bless his vindictive old heart, was no doubt too busy ruining someone else’s. Believe me, a bad review leaves a bad taste all day long.
That’s not because of any...
|
|
Mar.02.2010
Top crime fiction blog Gumshoe Review rates my new Palestinian crime novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN very highly: "Rees does an excellent job of showing the pressures on the young Palestinians and describing the microcosm of one immigrant community within the U.S. The mystery also contains plenty of...
|
Feb.28.2010
The first line of a great novel tends also to have a lot of punch -- to "grab" you. My favorite has for a long time been "The Sun Also Rises." Its first couple of sentences manage to tell you a great deal about one of the main characters, but even more about the narrator: "...
|
|
Feb.27.2010
New Yorkers have "seen it all" -- that's their attitude to life. It's not surprising, given the madhouse that is the Big Apple. But I've now officially done something that'll shock them. In The New York Times Book Review's crime fiction roundup by Marilyn Stasio, my new novel THE FOURTH...
|
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...
|
|
Feb.12.2010
I’ve been called the Dashiell Hammett of Palestine, the John Le Carre of the Middle East, the James Ellroy of…Palestine, the Graham Greene of Jerusalem, and the Georges Simenon of the Palestinian refugee camps. Depends which review you happen to have read.
I’ve published three previous novels about...
|
Feb.08.2010
The Campaign for the American Reader blog empire's flagship is the Page 69 Test. The premise is this: open any book to page 69; if it grabs you, that's a better indication of whether you'll enjoy the book than simply reading the opening page. Try it on a book you like (and one you don't), it...
|