The Man of Twists and Turns

During my tour of Germany — well, more of a quick swing through the west, having had a vacation in Berlin — I stopped in at the excellent DRadio Wissen, a fairly new branch of Deutschlandfunk. These ladies, lead by the lovely Lena Staerk, certainly were quite funky. Also cosmopolitan, broadcasting for nearly two hours [...]

Cairo is a place we all know to some degree, even if only the image of the pyramids and the Sphinx. A short visit there is enough to make you wonder about how much of this teeming metropolis you really don’t know. No writer gets so deep as Sanna Negus under the skin of [...]

An NPR foreign correspondent pal of mine used to have a list of seven ways for journalists to grow old gracefully. His premise, which is self-evident to anyone who’s been a reporter, was that daily news was an undignified thing to be doing in your 40s. I can’t remember the whole of the list. It [...]

The Forward profiles me and my series of Palestinian crime novels this week, calling it a “unique mystery series.” I’m very happy that their correspondent Amy Klein picked up on a particular point I made in our interview: “The thing not to lose sight of is that these are crime novels; they are entertaining. They [...]

Some authors exude the pleasure of reading and writing (and, believe me, when you meet them, you’d be surprised how many just don’t.) J. Sydney Jones is such a man, with a breadth of writing experience in different genres that’s deeply impressive and carries with it an obvious love of his craft. His Viennese Mystery [...]

Crime writer J. Sydney Jones has a new blog called Scene of the Crime. He aims to interview writers about the impact on their writing of the location and sense of place in their novels — usually from far-flung countries. This week he features me on my Palestinian crime novels. Read on, for the full [...]

I was invited to appear on a BBC World Service programme last weekend. If you’ve ever wondered how radio producers feed their on-air people interesting information about their guests (thus enabling them to create a breezy “chemistry” and to relate the day’s news stories to the knowledge or experience of the guest), here’s the questionnaire [...]

By now it’s no secret that the Iraq War has been a disillusioning experience for many of the U.S. servicemen sent there. The literature on the war has, so far, been mostly written by journalists. There’s plenty of it, and like most journalism it runs pretty mainstream and inoffensive, no matter how bloody the [...]

The last couple of articles about me and my books focus on the fact that I’m rather happy. In this month’s Hadassah Magazine, I’m “affable and trim.” High school friends reading this on Facebook may wonder where the affability was back then…
Profile: Hadassah Magazine October 2009 Matt Beynon Rees By Leora Eren Frucht Only [...]

Thomas Carlyle wrote that “A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.” There may be some debate as to whether Timothy Leary’s life was well-spent. However, his biography by John Higgs is one of the most well-written and compelling books you’ll ever come across. “I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy [...]