Reading
with Oprah
The Book Club that Changed
America
Kathleen
Rooney
The
first in-depth look at the phenomenon that is OBC
Adored
by its fans, deplored by its critics, the Oprah Book Club
has been at the center of arguments about cultural authority
and literary taste since its inception in 1996. Virtually
everyone seems to have an opinion about this monumental
institution with its revolutionary and controversial fusion
of the literary, the televisual, and the commercial. Reading
with Oprah by Kathleen Rooney is the first in-depth
look at the phenomenon that is the OBC.
Rooney
combines extensive research with a lively personal voice
and engaging narrative style to untangle the myths and presuppositions
surrounding the club, to reveal its complex and far-reaching
cultural influence, confronting head-on how the club became
a crucible for the heated clash between “high”
and “low” literary taste. Comprehensive and
up-to-date, the book features a wide survey of recent commentary,
and describes why the club closed in 2002, as well as why
it resumed almost a year later in 2003, with a new focus
on “great books.” Rooney also provides the most
extensive analysis yet of the Oprah Winfrey–Jonathan
Franzen contretemps.
Through
her close examination of each of the club’s selected
novels, as well as personal interviews and correspondence
with OBC authors, Rooney demonstrates that in its tumultuous
eight-year history the OBC has occupied a place of prominence
unique in the culture that neither its supporters nor detractors
have previously given it credit for.
“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, author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate
of Reading in an Electronic Age
“In
her lively, information-filled account of the club’s
history, Rooney . . . defends Oprah as a genuine ‘intellectual
force.’ . . . Accurately captures the cultural unrest
surrounding the Oprah Book Club and raises numerous thoughtful
points about its significance.”
—Publishers
Weekly
“Rooney’s
analysis of the Oprah Book Club is both incisive and sympathetic,
both scholarly in its methodology and accessible in its
presentation. Anyone interested in the multiple diversities
which characterize twenty-first century American culture
will find Reading with Oprah provocative and entertaining.”
—Tara
Ghoshal Wallace, author of Jane Austen and Narrative
Authority
Kathleen
Rooney is a writing instructor at Emerson
College. Winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize in
2004 and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from Poetry magazine,
she is editor of Redivider and has published a
number of poems, articles, and reviews in the Nation,
the Harvard Review, the Boston Review, Puerto
Del Sol, and Cimarron Review. This book grew
out of an article she wrote for the Nation about
her visit to the show where Winfrey announced the end of
the book club.
February
2005
230 pages, index, 6" x 9"
$24.95 Cloth
1-55728-782-1
