Page Readers is going Mobile!

Page Readers is now available on Stitcher, a mobile radio station available on your iPad, Smartphone and online.

This will expand our audience and give our guests more exposure for their work.  To listen, use the link above and create your free account.  Stitcher has lots of stations covering all kinds of topics.  So besides putting Page Readers on your favorite list, I'm sure you'll find much more to listen to!

To get Stitcher on your mobile device, use the App Store and search Stitcher.

With Stitcher you'll be able to listen to Page Readers on the go!  

Live Author Chat with Dr. Barry Sears, author of "The Zone Diet"

Join me on Thursday, July 28th at 6pm Pacific when I host a Live Author Video Chat presented by Book Candy Studios.

My guest will be Dr. Barry Sears, author of "The Zone Diet," and his latest release, "Toxic Fat.  When Good Fat Turns Bad."

These live author chats are like attending a book signing at your local book store without leaving home!  You'll be able to see the Dr., ask him questions via the chat room and watch the trailer of his latest book.  And - there might even be some freebies!

To use the widget below, click on the countdown (the numbers) just before the show starts.  On the next screen, click on the Guest tab and enter your name in the box that says "Guest" and click enter.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Sandra Sanchez interviews Nina Marie Gardner author of Sherry and Narcotics.  Read Sandra's review here.

Q. Hi, Nina, thanks for talking with us about your work. I'll start with that  most common combination question: When did you start writing? And what inspired you?

A. Since I was little, I always kept journals and read voraciously. Being immersed in a book has always been the ultimate comfort and escape for me - and the desire to write came naturally out of this love of stories and storytelling. I always think of that Joan Didion quote from "The White Album" - "We tell ourselves stories in order to live..." 

Q. Do you plan to write a sequel to Sherry and Narcotics?

A. Well, I've already written the prequel, my first (unpublished) novel, "I'm Not This Girl." It's basically the story of Mary in LA when she's fresh out of college, except her name is Lulu and she has this dog named Trouble. It explores her first real love, with a screenwriter named Dean, and her initial descent into alcoholism. It's a lot more playful and funny than "Sherry & Narcotics" - I only really showed it to this one agent and then spent a heartbreaking and frustrating three years doing rewrites for him, but in the end it just went nowhere. I love it though - I'm thinking I should dust off the original draft and send it around again.

I've also written a hefty chunk of the pre-prequel - the story of an American girl who winds up at an all boys boarding school in England , based on my experiences as an English Speaking Union Scholar at Clifton College in Bristol when I was 17. That was the beginning of my love affair with the UK - and English Literature. For my A-levels I studied Wordsworth and Hardy and DH Lawrence with this teacher Dave Lambert, who was fresh out of Oxford - I had a mad crush on him, of course. He was fairly eccentric and his classroom was filled with posters of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. One class the two of us wound up performing Adelaide 's lament from Guys & Dolls. 

The sequel to Sherry & Narcotics is something I've just started fleshing out - so I can't really say too much about it, except that it's about friendship and fame.

Q. What are some of your all time favorite books? Films? Plays?

A. My all time favorite books include the poems and letters of John Keats, everything by F. Scott Fitzgerald including his letters, and especially the short story collection edited by Malcolm Cowley - I love some of those lesser known stories like "Magnetism" and "Two Wrongs" and "The Bridal Party." And everything by Jean Rhys, she was a genius. I also love Anais Nin, an almost forgotten writer named Margery Latimer who wrote two stunning novels, "We are Incredible" and "This is my Body" which are next to impossible to find - I read one in the Yale Library, and bought one on eBay with a large chunk of my student loan money that supposed to go to my tuition. I love "Lay Down in Darkness" by William Styron and everything by Richard Yates. I remember once I discovered Yates wrote a screenplay for "Lay Down in Darkness" and that just blew my mind. What I would give to read that! 

Contemporary writers I love include Gwendoline Riley - I think her books "Cold Water" and "Joshua Spassky" are just perfect. Also Helen Walsh's "Brass", my publisher/editor at Future Fiction London, Hillary Raphael's "I love Lord Buddha" and "Ximena." I am in awe of Ruth Fowler, who I just discovered - she writes for The Fix and published a memoir about being a stripper in New York . 

I just saw the best film I've seen in a long time, Fishtank - it was absolutely beautiful, seamless, not a false moment in it. Also "Jesus' Son" is one of the best adaptations of a book, ever. And this film from awhile back, Angel Baby, about two schizophrenics who fall in love. Recently a friend recommended a good bankrobber flick because I was feeling broke - Mesrine I and II, which were awesome. Anything that fills my dreams with Vincent Cassel is the bomb.

Plays, I think Annie Baker is a genius. I've always loved Jon Robin Baitz (and thanks to my mom, I'm now hooked on his tv show Brothers & Sisters), Christopher Durang, Albert Innaurato. Also Mark Ravenhill's stuff is always exciting. And a New York playwright named Tom Donaghy - his play "Down the Shore" will always be one of my favorites. And Jonathan Marc Sherman - I'm really looking forward to seeing his new play Knickerbicker at the Public.

Q. Besides writing what are your interests?

A. Now that I'm old and boring and my wild party days are behind me, I'm really into running. I'm planning to do a marathon, and I pretty much enjoy everything outdoors - hiking, camping, all that robust and healthy stuff. I enjoy cooking, but I think I might be a little too experimental for a lot of people's tastes. I'm also very interested in working with young women at risk, especially those who might be struggling with alcoholism, addiction or eating disorder issues. I know it probably sounds massively trite and preachy and corny, but what matters most to me these days is being of service, and using my experience to hopefully help others.

Helping others does not sound corny to me. Good for you and thank you for telling us about yourself and your work.

Twitter 101 for Authors by Shelley Hitz

Hello to all you wonderful authors who’ve been my guest at Page Readers.  I hope you are all doing well and the wheels of your promotional campaign are moving along smoothly.

Many of you know that I am an active fan of twitter.  I say active fan, because I am active on twitter and a fan of all its uses.  As a promotion specialist, I use twitter to not only share my own information, like news of upcoming or recorded shows or new reviews posted to the Page Readers blog, but also to learn new things and meet new people.



I’ve met many of my guests on twitter, by using hash tags (#) to search topics or reading a re-tweeted post that caught my attention and led me to a new author.  Once you get into the habit of using twitter, it can be a very powerful tool.



Someone else I met on twitter is Shelley Hitz.  As a Self Publishing Coach, Shelly has many wonderful products available to help authors navigate the web in search of their own success.  


One tool she has produced is especially for authors who want to learn how to use twitter to successfully build their own audience.


Twitter 101 for Authors is a short, sweet and incredibly powerful tool created to help authors tap into the power of twitter without being overwhelmed, or worse, looking like a rookie tweeter.  Learn how to master the world of micro-blogging quickly, grow your audience and increase your book sales.

And connect with me on twitter! I love to re-tweet!

The Kitchen Daughter by Jael McHenry

Review by Sandra Sanchez

The Kitchen Daughter
byJael McHenry
Gallery Books
ISBN#978-1-4391-9169-9

Promotional materials say that the central question of this novel is “what does it mean to be normal?” As someone who doesn’t have a clue what “normal” means I was pleased that the author seeks to define “normal” in a manner that includes all kinds of people. The primary character, Ginny Selvaggio, takes a little getting used to but she grows on you.
The premise is that she is afflicted with a “syndrome” known as Aspergers but when asked by others what she “has” she responds : “A Personality.” Go Ginny.

The book deals with how people, namely Ginny, her sister Amanda, family friend Gert and Gert’s son Daniel deal with the untimely deaths of loved ones. For Ginny coping means cooking.  Ginny loves to cook. She likes the structure of recipes and has an obsessive compulsive’s attention to minute details that help her identify and savor every taste combined within them. The other thing that begins to happen in the kitchen after her parents are killed in a car crash is the appearance of ghosts. When Ginny follows the recipes left by dead people, mother, grandmother, an unknown woman  named Evangeline, and follows them perfectly, the smells of the foods bring forth the ghosts, briefly and apparently only once, so as she figures out how this works she realizes she needs to  have her questions ready.  No small anxiety there!

Ginny also seeks recipes for “being normal” in a book she calls “the normal book” with clippings from newspaper advice columnists and she checks it from time to time as a guide to how best to assess her own behavior. She also does research online and in her parents’ library where she sometimes goes to escape interpersonal encounters she knows she cannot handle.  In a book titled: An Anthropologist on Mars which she discovers is a collection of essays about people damaged in various ways, she reads an essay by a woman who has invented for herself a hugging machine, something to crawl into to feel loved. Ginny is jealous, averse to touch, she nonetheless needs it. To feel loved, to calm down, she frequently goes into her parents closet to feel surrounded by their clothing. So, yes, Ginny suffers but she also has a get real sense of humor. She looks up a definition of Aspergers on an online site  which lists various symptoms including this one:
A tendency to obsess on particular topics that may not be of interest to others,  she is reminded of  “everyone I have ever met” and remembers a boy in kindergarten who always talked about caterpillars, a girl in 4th grade obsessed with butterflies and the girl in college who only talked about beer and sex.

Eventually Gert, A Romanian Jewess from Cuba  who came to Philadelphia where she met Ginny’s mother,  manages to get Ginny out of the closet and out of the house to help her cook at the Jewish Temple for families who are in mourning. So cooking does indeed become the way she connects to, instead of escaping from, other people.

This book could be labeled “heartbreaking” just as Ginny could be labeled “damaged” but in truth the book was also uplifting with a realistic blend of sad and happy endings, and Ginny often made me smile. She definitely has “personality.”