Shot on location in Reggio Calabria by Michael Frierson, film professor at UNC-Greensboro.

I am happy to say that I’ll be on UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch program with host D.G. Martin on July 10 and July 12 at 5 p.m. The weekly series of author interviews starts its new season on July 5. Details are here. Hope you can tune in. 

A lovely endorsement from blogger Mary DeTerris Poust is here, second item. An excerpt: “It is a wonderful book that will make you want to get on the next plane to Italy to find your long lost relatives.”

Released today, by Harper Perennial. Available here. Take a look inside here.

Ok, I’m just a little excited. The paperback version of My Cousin the Saint comes out tomorrow, and I just got a little help from a wonderful American blogger in Calabria in getting the word out — Michelle Fabio, author of the popular Web site bleeding espresso. I was really happy to be able to excerpt her online review of my book in the paperback. Her post is here.

Filmed in Chorio, Italy, March 2008 by Michael Frierson, UNC-Greensboro.

The web site “31 Days of Italians,” which celebrates Italy, Italians and Italian-Americans every day of the month, reviews My Cousin the Saint here. Just in time for the paperback release in four days! (But who’s counting?)

A year ago, I had a wonderful in-depth interview regarding the release of My Cousin the Saint with Denise Franklin, host of WFDD’s Voices and Viewpoints program, out of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. Given the release of the paperback on June 16, WFDD will rebroadcast that interview this Friday at 1 p.m and 6 p.m. on 88.5 FM. The station can be picked up throughout the Triad and western North Carolina, or roughly a third of the state.

A long and admiring story in TheAlternativePress.com, based in North Jersey, discusses the Dominican nuns at the Monastery of Our Lady of the Rosary in Summit, NJ.

According to the story: “During the main meal, at noon, the nuns may sit in silence and eat or one sister reads from a book that they may be jointly reading as a group at the time. Currently, the book of the moment is “My Cousin the Saint” but they do have a full library available to them equipped with the classics as well as classical music.”

The blog Clerical Whispers reports: “The beatification of Pope John Paul II may be delayed as the Vatican seeks more documentation regarding his almost 27 years as pope, Italian newspapers reported in late May.”