| Reading
with Oprah
The Book Club that Changed America, 2nd Edition
Kathleen Rooney
An in-depth look at Oprah's
Book Club, now updated
“Lively . . . accurately captures the cultural unrest
surrounding the Oprah book club and raises numerous thoughtful
points about its significance.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This is a highly readable
book.”
—Library Journal
“Highly recommended.”
—Choice Magazine
“Rooney takes a steady, smart look at a situation that
is both fascinating in its own right and deeply revealing
about ‘how it is’ in our cultural life these days.”
—Sven Birkerts
Adored by its fans, deplored by its critics, Oprah’s
Book Club has been at the center of arguments about cultural
authority and literary taste since it began in 1996. Reading
with Oprah explores the club's revolutionary fusion of
books, television, and commerce and tells the engaging and
in-depth story of the OBC phenomenon.
Kathleen Rooney combines extensive research with a dynamic
voice to reveal the club’s far-reaching cultural impact
and its role as crucible for the clash between “high”
and “low” literary taste.
Comprehensive and up-to-date, the book covers the club from
its inception in 1996, through the Jonathan Franzen contretemps,
the surprising suspension in 2002, and, after the club’s
return in 2003, the progression from “great books”
to memoir. New material includes an extensive look at the
James Frey scandal and Oprah's turn to contemporary fiction,
including The Road and Middlesex.
Through close examination of Winfrey’s picks and personal
interviews with book club authors and readers, Rooney demonstrates
how the club that Barbara Kingsolver calls “one of the
best possible uses of a television set” has, according
to Wally Lamb, “gotten people of all ages to read, to
read more, and to read widely.”
Kathleen
Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and
the author of the upcoming University of Arkansas Press title
Live Nude Girl. She has cowritten the collaborative
poetry collections Something Really Wonderful and
That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness with Elisa Gabbert.
Her poems and essays have appeared in many publications, including
the Nation, Gettysburg Review, Harvard
Review, and Another Chicago Magazine. She lives
in Chicago.
Original
cloth edition.
April
6 x 9, 280 pages, index
$17.95 paper
ISBN 978-1-55728-873-8 | 1-55728-873-9
$24.95 Cloth
978-1-55728-782-3 | 1-55728-782-1
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