MattRees.net

On the whole, it’d better if there was no war. But war has given us some of the great novels of all time. Until now, the Iraq war has been written about mainly in macho with-the-troops memoirs by embedded journalists, dry-as-dust nonfiction, and bile-licious invective. Unless you’re macho, dry, or hateful, none of these are [...]

Jon Friedman‘s first book was what you might expect from a young financial-markets journalist. Published in 1993, “House of Cards” was a fast-paced story of the blunders at American Express during the 1980s, including smear campaigns, duff accounting, and a CEO whose name was synonymous with hubris (until, in recent years, hubris became the official [...]

Machiavelli wrote that “Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.” That’s certainly true of the Six-Day War of 1967. When fired upon in Jerusalem some months after the passage of those six days, Graham Greene commented that it was perhaps an inaccurate name for the conflict. Indeed the battle [...]

When she was in her early twenties, Egyptian writer Ghada Abdel Aal began the complicated process of seeking a spouse. It involved meetings in parental living rooms over awkward glasses of tea. On one such occasion her potential groom spent his time screaming at a soccer game on tv. Another turned out to have a [...]

When Kamal Abdel-Malek was a young student, he chose to study outside the Arab world, eventually becoming a professor at Brown and Princeton Universities in the US. It was the first step in the physical and intellectual journeys of this intriguing Egyptian writer. Born in Alexandria and now a teacher of Arabic literature at the [...]

I’ve hosted award-winning writers on this blog before – but never on the day that they received an award. Yet just today the fabulous Italian writer Francesca Melandri received the Book of the Year award from Elle magazine. And justly so. Her novel, “Eva dorme,” tackles the kinds of social issues that only the greatest [...]

If you were a book editor who wanted to create the perfect writer for a best-selling epic novel of an African-born doctor forced to take refuge in the U.S., you might pick someone from Ethiopia. Make him of Christian Indian parentage. Educate him in medicine and send him to the Iowa Writing Program. Make him [...]

Tess Gerritsen started with romance, but soon realized that dead bodies were where it’s at. At least, dead bodies handled deftly by the two most compelling female series characters in thriller fiction, Detective Jane Rizzoli and Dr. Maura Isles. Her first books were romance novels, but after writing eight of them she switched to medical [...]

Move over cards, cocaine, and nicotine, Virtual Reality is the new addiction. It isn’t restricted to the realms of academe or science fiction. Whether you know it or not, it’s going to change your life. It already may have done so. Stanford University Professor Jeremy Bailenson is co-author of a new book, Infinite Reality, which [...]

When you ask writers what underpins the greatest books, they may talk about structure, style, character-building. The best of them identify the novelist’s emotional understanding of himself and his ability to translate it to the page. That’s what strikes readers – perhaps without their even knowing it – and gives them an immediate connection to [...]