Dexter Filkins, a star war correspondent for The New York Times, is heading to The New Yorker, a person familiar with the situation tells The Observer.
“I love the New York Times, and I’m hugely grateful for all they’ve done for me. I’ll miss everyone there very much. The New Yorker has offered me a Read More
Not long ago, Richard Engel, the chief foreign correspondent for NBC News, was working on a story in eastern Afghanistan near the border with Pakistan. One day, he hiked for 45 minutes up a mountain. On the top of the hill, he found a tiny guard tower, looking over into Pakistan, where a few U.S. Read More
On Saturday night, The National Book Critics Circle announced 2008′s finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards.
Among the fiction finalists was the late Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. In nonfiction, The New York Times‘s Dexter Filkins was nominated for The Forever War.
In September 2008, Mr. Filkins told The Observer‘s Leon Read More
In a company-wide memo sent to Random House staff this afternoon—labeled "a very different memo" by company spokesman Stuart Applebaum when he forwarded it to media—Markus Dohle turned a spotlight upon Random House’s strong presence on year-end book lists published this week by The Toronto Globe and Mail and The New York Times Read More
The New York Times Book Review released its 100 Notable Books of 2008.
Notably, there are a lot of New York Times writers on the list, among them:
- The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power by Jonathan Mahler.
Even though the election and economic crisis have pushed the Iraq war off the front—or even the first dozen—pages of newspapers, the December 2008 issue of Vanity Fair features an article by Seth Mnookin in which he reports on life inside The New York Times‘ Baghdad bureau. The story is not yet online, but Read More
The Forever War
By Dexter Filkins
Alfred A. Knopf, 368 pages, $25
Dexter Filkins is a runner. During his three and a half years in Iraq, he’d regularly lace up his shoes, don his short shorts and stride along the Tigris River even in unbearable, 100-degree-plus heat. At first it was a simple, there-and-back, five-mile Read More
Felix Gillette writes that "On the morning of Sept. 14, during a Sunday morning Palin-palooza, George Will sized up the made-for-TV story line thusly: “We had the tech bubble. The housing bubble. Now we have the Palin bubble. Sooner or later bubbles do what bubbles do. But not yet. This is still going strong.” Read More
When he left Iraq in August 2006, Dexter Filkins didn’t expect to return anytime soon. He’d been there, reporting for The New York Times, since the U.S. invaded three years earlier. Before that he was in Afghanistan, covering a different war. He’d filled 561 notebooks over the course of his years in the Middle East, Read More
In June, The Observer talked to a number of reporters who’d spent time covering the war in Iraq. While some of their anecdotes sketched out what it’s like to be in a dangerous reporting environment—the mortar attacks, the sandstorms, the numbing repetitiveness of a seemingly endless conflict—nothing in that article could prepare readers for Read More
