The Man of Twists and Turns

On my book tours I often venture to places few others visit. There are book festivals in tiny provincial towns. Readings at bookshops in small rural villages. This week I spoke in a German town that many Germans are convinced doesn’t even exist.
Bielefeld (population 330,000) is a town in North Rhine-Westphalia. Or is it?
Since the [...]

When you sit on a stage to do a book reading or to discuss writing with other authors, you might think it natural to slip into a script. Improvisation might make you look hesitant in comparison with the polished stories you’ve told many times before. But you’d be surprised – well, I’m surprised – at [...]

I’m doing a talk about how and why I write my Palestinian crime novels at the Goethe Institute Monday night at 8 p.m., along with a couple of other interesting Jerusalem-based writers. More details here, but the address is:
Goethe-Institut, German Cultural Center Jerusalem
15 Sokolov St.
Jerusalem
The other writers are:
Gil Yaron, doctor and journalist. Yaron was born [...]

I was at Oxford University at the same time as Britain’s new prime minister. But while I spent all my free time at a famous old pub opposite the historic Bodleian Library with a pint of Guinness in the company of some old Irish porters, I never saw David Cameron there. Which makes me doubt [...]

I spoke this week to a group touring Israel and Palestine from J Street, an American group which aims to provide an alternative perspective on the conflict hereabouts to the one put forward by AIPAC. The idea: AIPAC is a bit stuck in the mud, because it toes the line of the utterly mudstuck Israeli [...]

When you live in a foreign place, it can become home. You forget 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 during the last week, when I toured [...]

This weekend I was in Leipzig, Germany, for one of the country’s biggest book fairs. While there I was interviewed for German tv in front of a big audience of festivalgoers, many of whom were mysteriously dressed as Japenese cartoon characters… In fact, the Blue Sofa is right at the entrance to the book fair [...]

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 crime novels [...]

Award-winning crime writer Matt Beynon Rees reads from THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, his new novel, Feb. 2 in New York.
The fourth installment in Matt’s Crime Writers Association Dagger-winning series about Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef is published Feb. 1. In New York for a UN conference, Omar uncovers an assassination plot. The suspect: his own son. Omar’s [...]

Everyone comes back to Jerusalem. I don’t know why, I really don’t.
It’s too hot. The people can be offhandedly mean, and they drive as though they want to kill you. It isn’t a very pretty place once you look close. Oh and, yes, sometimes it gets violent. With shocking self-obsession, it thinks the eyes of [...]