"It's a love story, but in a much larger sense, it's about loving life and wanting as much of it as you can have," says Robert about THIRD WISH
For more details and a chance to win a free copy of THIRD WISH, visit The Words To Mouth website.

Third Wish, Robert Fulghum

Words To Mouth is an author interview talk show where readers meet authors beyond the printed page…and win FREE books.



Come discover new and seasoned authors and the books they write. Carrie Runnals understands the challenges of being a busy woman juggling work-life balance. She scours the literary market and keeps a pulse on new book releases for you. Hear about the latest must-read novels and nonfiction as Carrie gets the answers to questions you want asked with authors you’d love to meet. She goes beyond the book subject, not only pulling plot and inspiration, but delving deeper into what makes the author tick.



Carrie interviews authors across genres from light chick lit and romance to memoirs, historical fiction, and mystery—even nonfiction books on family and relationships. So, take Words To Mouth along as you multi-task through your active days, then pop on the website and enter to win free copies of the books that most intrigue you. Or if you can’t wait, simply purchase the hardback/paperback copies online through convenient links to top booksellers. Carrie provides both audio and transcribed interviews—so you can access the information in your preferred method—as well as book excerpts and reviews and the opportunity to interact with other book lovers online.




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Society &amp; Culture

To enter to win a free copy of Attack of the Theater People:

Be sure to subscribe to the Words To Mouth e-newsletter ~ That is how I announce winners!
Leave a Comment Below or Call 206–309–7318 sharing about your own guerilla theater AND
Subscribe to Words To Mouth podcast/blog by clicking the icon to the right or Subscribe to Words To Mouth on iTunes
Deadline for entry - February 15th, 2009 midnight, EST
U.S. & Canada residents only; No P.O. Box
Attack of the Theater People Synopsis:It's 1986, and twenty-year-old Edward Zanni has been kicked out of drama school for being "too jazz hands for Juilliard." Mortified, Edward heads out into the wonderland of 80s New York City, bumbling through a series of disastrous day jobs before finally finding one that suits his limited abilities. Working as a "party motivator," Edward excels at getting thirteen-year-olds to dance at Bar Mitzvahs and charming business people as a "stealth guest" at corporate events. Eventually, he attracts the attention of Chad Severson, a devastatingly charismatic and unscrupulous young stockbroker who befriends Edward in order to obtain insider trading information. Unaware he's breaking the law, Edward is soon in a heap of trouble. Not only are the feds after him, but he's being stalked by an obsessive thirteen-year-old Bat Mitzvah groupie, and facing the revenge of his spiteful ex-stepmother, Dagmar. Only the help of his crew from How I Paid for College can rescue Edward from a stretch in Club Fed, tumbling him into an adventure involving roller-skating actors, jet-setting Persians, guerilla theater, and a Springsteen tribute band called Almost Bruce. Together, they must give the performance of their lives. Laced with the inspired zaniness of classic American musical comedy, Attack of the Theater People matches the big hair of the eighties with an even bigger heart. 
Visit Words To Mouth website for mentioned links for The Mesmer Project,Marc Acito’s Website and Tahoe Jackson 
Book Recommendations:

Heartburn by Nora Ephron
Christopher Rice (Anne Rice's Son) Light Before Day 
Thanks, as always, to Natalie Brown for her song You Gotta Believe from the Podsafe Music Network.

Attack of the Theater People, Marc Acito

To enter to win a free copy of STILL ALICE:

Be sure to subscribe to the Words To Mouth e-newsletter ~ That is how I announce winners!
Leave a Comment Below (if you've read the book, tell us who you see playing Alice or any of the other main characters of the book)
Call 206-309-7318 and leave a voice mail message sharing something I can play on-air
Subscribe to Words To Mouth via the link on my website or on iTunes
Deadline for entry - February 30th, midnight, EST
U.S. & Canada residents only; No P.O. Boxes
STILL ALICE Synopsis:Still Alice is a compelling debut novel about a 50-year-old woman's sudden descent into early onset Alzheimer's disease, written by first-time author Lisa Genova, who holds a Ph. D in neuroscience from Harvard University. Alice Howland, happily married with three grown children and a house on the Cape, is a celebrated Harvard professor at the height of her career when she notices a forgetfulness creeping into her life. As confusion starts to cloud her thinking and her memory begins to fail her, she receives a devastating diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer's disease. Fiercely independent, Alice struggles to maintain her lifestyle and live in the moment, even as her sense of self is being stripped away. In turns heartbreaking, inspiring and terrifying, Still Alice captures in remarkable detail what's it's like to literally lose your mind...
“The book is about a young woman’s descent into dementia. And of course, we see her struggle against this horrifying and inevitable descent. But interestingly, as her cognitive capabilities diminish, we also get to see her grow. As her symptoms worsen, Alice loses her cerebral life at Harvard, where she’d placed her worth and identity, where she’d been valued and respected. Without it, she embarks on a desperate search for answers to questions like ‘Who am I now?’ and ‘How do I matter?' and is forced to search for meaning and intimacy beyond career success in her relationships with her husband and children, relationships previously neglected or on autopilot. But has too much time and distance passed in those relationships, and has Alice already lost too much of herself to reconnect before she dies?” Lisa Genova
Lisa's Bio:Lisa Genova graduated valedictorian from Bates College with a degree in Biopsychology and has a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Harvard University. She has done research on the molecular etiology of depression, Parkinson's Disease, drug addiction, and memory loss following stroke. She is a proud and active member of the Dementia Advocacy & Support Network Internationaland DementiaUSAand is an online columnist for the National Alzheimer’s Association. She spends a considerable amount of time acting on stage in Boston and in local independent films. She is currently working on her next novel, LEFT NEGLECTED.
Books Lisa Mentioned:

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks
Thirty-Six Hour Day, C. Rayner
The Lace Reader, Brunonia Barry
Don't Leave Me this Way, Julia Fox Garrison
**Thanks, as always, to Natalie Brown for her song You Gotta Believe from the Podsafe Music Network.
For links to cited books and websites, visit Words To Mouth website

Still Alice, Lisa Genova

COLD PURSUIT Synopsis
New York Times bestselling author Carla Neggers leads readers into adeadly chase, where the right step can lead to the truth...and a single misstep spells disaster. A prominent ambassador is killed in a suspicious hit-and-run in Washington, D.C. Hours later, his stepdaughter vanishes in the mountains of northern New England. Back in her hometown of Black Falls, Vermont, to do damage control on her career, Secret Service agent Jo Harper is drawn into the search. But her efforts face an unexpected challenge: Elijah Cameron. With his military training and mountain rescue experience, Elijah knows the unforgiving terrain better than anyone. But he and Jo have been at odds forever—and Elijah believes the missing teenager isn't just lost…she's on the run. Forced to work together, Jo and Elijah battle time and the elements in a race into the unforgiving mountains. The twists and turns awaiting them will take them closer to the explosive truth…and into the sights of a killer.
Favorite Authors:

Rex Stout
Mary Stewart
Carla's Reading Now:

MJ Rose's latest The Memorist
**If you like time travel, check out The Time Traveler's Wife 
Visit Words To Mouth website for links to Carla Negger's books and read an excerpt of COLD PURSUIT and her very latest THE BETRAYALS
Carla follows Nora Robert's sage advice "I can fix a bad page, but I can't fix a blank one"

Cold Pursuit, Carla Neggers

Upon editing my conversation with Josh, I realized this interview is as much for writersas it is readers. Josh, foldshis life philosophies and his writing tips adeptly into MATRIMONY and our interview. He isan engaging conservationalist and a natural teacher, not to mention, of course, a gifted writer.
How would you summarize Matrimony?(From Josh's website)
Jonathan Franzen once said that the better a novel is, the more difficult it is to summarize. The protagonist in Martin Amis's novel The Information says something similar. He's a writer himself and he's being interviewed about his novel and the interviewer keeps asking him what his novel is about. Amis's protagonist, who, like many Amis protagonists, is a pretty difficult fellow, says something to the effect of, "It's 150,000 words, and if I could have said it in any less I would have." I sympathize. But if I had to describe Matrimony, I'd say it's about the twenty-year history of a marriage (it's about two marriages, actually--arguably three) and that it's about love and friendship, and the pleasures and perils that attend to those things. More generally, the novel is about what it's like to be in your twenties and thirties--even your forties in some cases--when you're waiting for life to begin and you find to your surprise that it already has begun and that the decisions you make have consequences that you're not even aware of yet. This is particularly pronounced in the case of my protagonists, Julian and Mia, since they get married at twenty-two, right out of college, and find themselves a year later living in Ann Arbor among friends for whom marriage is the last thing on their minds. College towns can perpetuate an eternal adolescence--I know; I've lived in a lot of them. And there's a real divide between married people and single people, the way further down the line there's an even bigger divide between people who have children and people who don't. So Julian and Mia have done what seems like the supremely adult act--getting married--even as in other ways they are far from fully formed. This is certainly true professionally. Julian is struggling to finish his novel; Mia is slogging away on her psychology dissertation. In that sense, the book is about what happens when life calls even when you're not ready for it to come calling. 
Josh's advice about writing that first draft:"Write by hand...to move forward and not back" and "Write, write, write and read, read READ!"

Oops, one question from Mari I missed (Thank goodness Josh was willing to answer via email):Mari: The dialog was so meaningful throughout the book, I would like to know if the author was able to reflect his life (did his parents share tidbits of wisdom or is this his creativity)? Here’s an example: Page 59 – “My father’s always saying that college is the great equalizer. Here, we’re all taking the same courses and eating the same meals. But then we graduate and gravitate toward our own kind.” What a strong statement/wisdom. I noted several phrases in the book that read like “ah-ha” moments to me. 
Josh: That's a great question. That actual line of dialogue, like all the dialogue I wrote--like everything in MATRIMONY, in fact--is made up. But a writer is always on the lookout, always thinking, always observing, and you absorb the things that people say to you. Certainly my parents shared tidbits of wisdom with me over the years. It's hard to imagine a parent who doesn't, and perhaps my parents especially--my father was a professor for 50 years, so teaching came naturally to him, and to my mother as well, even if in a different way. But neither of my parents ever said that line of dialogue. Almost everything I write comes to me only at the moment I write it, though of course there are years of having lived and thought about things stored away somewhere in the recesses of my brain. In general, I love writing dialogue. How people speak characterizes them so deeply. it's interesting to me (and pleasing) that you chose the line of dialogue you did. It's not a major moment in the novel, it would seem, but to me it is a major moment and one that I often bring up when I talk with book clubs. I'm more than twenty years out of college now, and I'm struck by how different many of my college friends are from what they were like in college, but how similar they are to what they were like before college, and to what their parents are like. I think college is a time of real experimentation for a lot of people. Economic concerns, while still present, may be less pressing than they are later, and so people are more on the same playing field. It's the great equalizer, as Carter's father says. And in some ways, though I didn't realize it as I was writing the book, this idea, this tension, is the driving force behind everything that happens in MATRIMONY. You take a couple that meet in college, you take friends that meet in college, and you subject them to what life is like after college, and interesting things happen. What is it like to fall in love in college and to try to stay in love many years later? That, to me, is what MATRIMONY is about."
To read an excerpt of MATRIMONY and Josh's SUGGESTED READING, and find out how to have Josh "visit" your book club, check out the Words To Mouth website.

Third Wish, Robert Fulghum

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