Middle East | Middle East
Mar.31.2010
Creating ELI - the novel
ELI means ‘My God' and is taking from the Holy Bible in the words ‘ELI, ELI lama sabathani'. ELI is a spiritual book and the second in a trilogy that begun with the book Divinity Dawns. It is partly an autobiography with the names of the characters in the book altered. It...
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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...
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Mar.23.2010
Here in the States, when someone mentions "UI," most of us think of Unemployment Insurance, but not former UK prime minister Tony Blair.
Late last week came word of a major scandal from the UK Daily Mail. In the three years since he stepped down as prime minister, Blair pocketed more...
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Mar.11.2010
As I trundle around the Levant researching my Palestinian crime novels, I love to come upon a stinking squatting-toilet, its evacuation hole bubbling with dark, sinister turds and the air strong with the scent of barely digested, unhygienically prepared lamb kebab. I adore such a khazi on sight,...
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Mar.04.2010
I have a lot of good reasons for staying in the Middle East as long as I have. While the main thing keeping me here 14 years and counting may truly be inertia, I also enjoy being an outsider, researching my Palestinian crime novels on site, visiting the Palestinian towns whose atmosphere of...
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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...
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Feb.26.2010
How the son of a Hamas founder ended up an Israeli agent, as told by the "Green Prince" himself. (I posted this on GlobalPost)RAMALLAH, West Bank — Parents often lament that their kids don’t follow them into their chosen professions. They ought to think themselves lucky. They could be...
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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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Feb.22.2010
The Independent has a regular feature in which it asks authors to write about a book which changed their lives somehow. Last week the London newspaper asked me to write the piece. Here it is:
In early 1999, King Hussein fell sick on his return from treatment for cancer in the US. I was the Middle...
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Feb.21.2010
Was Israeli intelligence really behind the video showing an Abbas aide soliciting sex? (I posted this on Global Post.)Afficionadoes of the oeuvre of Jamaican reggae singer Shaggy will already be familiar with the strategy of a Palestinian official caught with his pants down — more precisely, with...
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