Dexter Filkins

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 Book Review.

Mr. Dohle delighted in the fact that fully nine of the ten books on the NYTBR list had been published by Random House. Those nine, for the record: Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser; A Mercy by Toni Morrison; Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri; The Forever War by Dexter Filkins; Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes; The Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust; The World Is What It Is by Patrick French; Netherland by Joseph O'Neill; and The Dark Side by Jane Mayer.

Under Random House's old structure, eight of those nine would count as Knopf books, but after yesterday's reorganization, which stripped Jane Mayer's publisher, Doubleday, of its divisional status and placed it under the jurisdiction of Sonny Mehta, it is all nine. Mr. Dohle did not draw attention to this fact, presumably in the interest of fostering in-house harmony.  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.

- Condoleezza Rice: An American Life by Elisabeth Bumiller.

- The Forever War by Dexter Filkins.

- Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman.

- The House at Sugar Beach by Helene Cooper.

- The Night of the Gun by David Carr.

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 it's full of interesting points, including details of "internecine warfare that once wracked the bureau." Update: November 4, 2008: Here it is: The New York Times’s Lonely War.

According to Mr. Mnookin, maintaining a presence in Iraq costs The Times "upwards of $3 million a year.  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 course, past waving children and friendly folks, past a field of green the Americans had laid by the riverbank as part of a park project. Then his path was truncated by a checkpoint, then by another, until finally his run was a short sprint distance that he’d repeat enough times to make his mileage.  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.” And for the time being, it remains a seller’s market. (A few days after Mr. Will’s assessment, CBS News announced that Katie Couric had landed the second broadcast-news interview with the in-demand governor.)."

Does print journalism matter in this election, wonders John Koblin, now that "in-boxes crammed with New York Times articles and Huffington Post hyperlinks do not advertise their relative value or importance. Everything is equal, everything is a tie and nothing, it seems, is important anymore."

Leon Neyfakh talks to David Foster Wallace's agent and editor about whether or not fans can expect new work from the late author. "When we put together the 10th anniversary for Infinite Jest two years ago, we had an event in New York and an event in Los Angeles, and I talked with him about whether he would like to come be part of them," says Mr. Wallace's editor, Michael Pietsch. "I was not surprised to hear that he was wary of that idea. 'I'll do anything you want me to do,' he said, 'but please don't ask me to do this, please, please, please. I'm working on something long and it takes me a long time to get back into it after I'm pulled away from it.'" Plus: Carrie Bradshaw, the Teenage Years.

Plus: NBC News... Dexter Filkins... Two and a Half Sitcom Wriers Left in Hollywood... Graydon Carter.

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, and that felt like enough: As he put it last week in an interview with The Observer, he was pretty wiped out.

He said this over the phone, speaking from The Times’ Baghdad bureau. He’d been there a month. The city was calmer than it was when he’d left it two years before, he said, and it felt good to be back.  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 the unflinching account of the war offered by New York Times' reporter Dexter Filkins in his book, The Forever War, which The Times Magazine excerpted this week.

Here's how Mr. Filkins' describes reporting from Baghdad for The Times: "When I was in Iraq, I might as well have been circling the earth from a space capsule, circling in farthest orbit. Like Laika in Sputnik. A dog in space. Sending signals back to base, unmoored and weightless and no longer marking time."  read more »

"I had a big birthday the other day, a birthday with a zero in it," said Jim Muir, the Baghdad bureau chief for the BBC. "Unbeknownst to me they organized a surprise party. They put out an invitation to our street, which we share with the New York Times, and Reuters, and the AP, and various other news outlets. Only two people came."

The life of a foreign correspondent can be an isolating job; but that is nowhere as true as it is for the reporters covering Baghdad.

It’s rare that you ever leave your bureau at all. When you do, you’re taking one giant risk. So is it really worth it to grab your buddies in the bureau, corral security detail and some translators all so you can share a glass of wine with another reporter?

And if you did … where would you go?

"This is the single worst war I’ve ever had to cover in terms of after hours," said Terry McCarthy, bureau chief for ABC. "There are no bars here. We can’t really go out at night. You really only socialize with the people in your own compound. It’s not fun."

"Once you are in Iraq you have to live it 24 hours a day," said Michael Ware of CNN. "It’s not as if you can stroll down to a restaurant. It’s not as if there is anything of an ilk of a great Saigon bar."

"It’s the most confining story I’ve ever covered," said Bob Reid, the AP’s bureau chief, and 31-year veteran of foreign assignments. "I find actually it’s quite limiting. When you talk to other reporters, it’s good to bounce off ideas and some perspective. It helps you round your opinion of what’s going on and that’s very difficult in an environment like this."  read more »

... And now they’re getting out: Grizzled Bureau Chief Burns to England, Wong to West 43rd; as security crumbles, James Glanz takes the reigns and Dexter Filkins reminisces.  read more »

Dexter Filkins, the longtime New York Times Baghdad correspondent, takes the cover of the NYT mag this upcoming weekend with a profile of Ahmad Chalabi, Iraqi politician, CIA source, and all-around slippery fish.

In the profile, Chalabi denies--"This is an urban myth"-- that he mislead the Bush administration about W.M.D.s. Chalabi also says that the Iraqi defectors that he provided to U.S. agents for intel on Iraq's Hussein regime were pretty much random guys that Chalabi wouldn't vouch for at all.

And how does he think the occupation of Iraq is going? "The Americans screwed it up," says Chalabi.

But what of Chalabi's role in the overtures to a war?

Filkins writes: "It was Chalabi, after all--a foreigner, an Arab--who persuaded the most powerful men and women in the United States to make the liberation of Iraq not merely a priority but an obsession. .... Chalabi [persuaded] the Bush administration of the necessity of using force to destroy Saddam Huseein. And when it all went bad, when those nuclear weapons never turned up, the clever child shrugged and smiled."

"When no W.M.D. turned up, more and more Americans came to blame Chalabi for the war," is how Filkins puts it.

Only once does the role of the Times in the lead-up to the war explicitly crop up.

There is one parenthetical expression, which begins: "A New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, was one of Chalabi's primary conduits...."

That done, Filkins writes: "Indeed, the press proved even more gullible than the intelligence experts in the American government."

New York Times Iraq correspondent Dexter Filkins will be writing a book about his experience covering terrorism in the Middle East. Filkins' agent Amanda Urban at ICM completed the deal on June 6 with Knopf.

"It'll be less a reported book than a Dispatches," Urban said by phone of Filkins' proposal, referring to Michael Herr's seminal account of the Vietnam war. "Dexter's book will be more impressionistic. He's covered terrorism in one place or another for nine years. He's watched the Twin Towers fall, he's been in Afghanistan and Iraq. It will be a recounting of those experiences...It's no secret that a lot of Iraq books haven't succeeded. The idea here is to write a book that will be an evergreen, that will rise above just an account of the war."

Filkins was in New York last week meeting with publishers before returning to Iraq on Sunday, three days before American forces killed Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

In September, Filkins will leave the Times' Baghdad bureau and begin a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, where he will write his book. Knopf editor Jonathan Segal, who bought the proposal for six figures, didn't return a call seeking comment. Urban declined to comment on the advance.

--Gabriel Sherman

A friend who attended the Times Magazine panel on Iraq coverage last Sunday (which was reported in the Observer) tells me she was stunned to hear Times Baghdad correspondent Dexter Filkins describe how few reporters from countries beside the U.K. and the U.S. are now there. My friend summarized the point: "Other countries don't see it as their war, and the risks are too high."

I emailed Filkins to clarify the point, and asked him Was he already back in Baghdad. He responded:

Someone asked me about other foreign news organizations in Baghdad. I said there were few reporters left in Baghdad of any nationality. I would guess there are probably fewer than 50 here now; there were hundreds, maybe more than a thousand, in 2003 and 2004. There are still some reporters here for European newspapers, wire services and television, but very few. And yes, I left [the panel] to go the airport and Baghdad. I'm in Baghdad now.

On the day that American bombs began dropping on Iraq in March 2003, The New York Times’ Dexte  read more »

On the day that American bombs began dropping on Iraq in March 2003, The New York Times’ Dexter Fi  read more »