omar yussef | omar yussef
Sep.26.2010
I have a new book coming out in the UK next spring. So it’s time to start looking around to see what new web gadgets and gismos authors are expected to shell out for from their meager advances to keep their “web profile” current.It’s a new arms race. Just as the Soviets bankrupted their (morally...
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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...
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Jun.17.2010
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...
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May.13.2010
“Exotic” crime fiction has taken off in the last decade. People want to read about detectives in far-off places, even if they don’t want to wade through learned histories of those distant lands.Many of the biggest selling novels of the last decade have been “exotic crime.” You’ll find a detective...
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May.13.2010
“Exotic” crime fiction has taken off in the last decade. People want to read about detectives in far-off places, even if they don’t want to wade through learned histories of those distant lands.Many of the biggest selling novels of the last decade have been “exotic crime.” You’ll find a detective...
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May.06.2010
A friend of mine was lunching with a Scandinavian author a while back. At one point, the writer joked: “But that’s enough of me talking about myself. What do YOU think of me?”
Unlike that charming Scandinavian, I don’t care what you think of me. Don’t be offended – I'm not interested in what I...
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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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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...
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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: "...
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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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