"ASK ME, UH-HO-HO, ASK ME"

Welcome! We have a very special guest today. After he and his wife hung out with a friend of mine in Israel, after he and I wrote for a few of the same places and publications, and lived in the same city for a time and such, I've been about one-degree of separation from this guy for about a year, so it's time, I decided, that he paid us a visit here at Bigmouth. Tada! Please welcome Matthue Roth, author of Yom Kippur a Go-Go (love that title more than I can tell you), Never Mind The Goldbergs, and Candy In Action, a new novel that made me go, "Ha! Yes!" out loud about dozen times . You guys, when he says, "supermodels, kung-fu and a free soundtrack", he's not kidding. Hit his website and find the soundtrack, order the books, read all about him on his blog and all that good stuff.

So, I caught up with him and he was good enough to chat with us.

Guth: Tell us what you write, what you have written and how you do it?

Roth: I write whatever comes out of me -- which mostly ends up being novels for teenagers, which is mostly because I'm basically a teenager. My new novel, Candy in Action, is about supermodels who know kung-fu. It's kind of about how nobody sees the real you. And how one karate chop can change all that.

I also made a soundtrack for the book. Twelve different bands recorded songs about the book, and it's free if you go to www.candyinaction.com. I'd like to credit it all to my overebullient
enthusiasm for Candy, but it's more that a bunch of amazing musicians let loose their creativity on the simple idea of a hot girl beating up stodgy sexist guys.

Guth: I so thought about making a soundtrack for my novel, too. Well, kudos to you for doing it. Don't mind me at all while I totally do that for my next book. Ahem. Anyway. What grand things are next for you? What would you, we're talking dream gigs and adventures here, love to be next for you?

Roth: I'm about to have my first kid, in a few days. That's a pretty big project. (Update: Welcome to the word darling girl with the shiny black punk hair. Mazel tov to the new parents.) My next novel is coming out on PUSH/Scholastic in September. It's called LOSERS, and it's about Russian Jewish immigrant geeks -- a very, very loose cover of the '80s TV show "Parker Lewis Can't Lose." But, you know, with Russians and X-Men.

Guth: Ha, way cool. Rock on. Speaking of--- What Smiths or Morrissey song or lyric best sums it up for you right now?

Roth: The natural impulse would be that song off the new record that starts off "She told me she loved me, which means she must be insane" -- it's a good motto for my life. But the truth would come a lot closer to "Hairdresser on Fire," off Morrissey's first solo album -- "You are
repressed/But you're remarkably dressed."

Guth again. Many thanks, Matthue, for swinging by. Mazel tov to you and your wife on the birth of your daughter (hope you are both getting a little sleep), and do come back and visit again any time. Now, my dear readers, you know what to do. Head out and pick up his books, tell your friends all about them, track him down on GoodReads and LibraryThing and Shelfari and Facebook and friend-request him and show him some love.

Want to be a featured author/writer type for this? Well, just send an email to me and I'll tell you everything you need to know.