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Oprah Winfrey's Book Club to Return

Posted on: Friday, 13 June 2003, 06:00 CDT

Get ready for the return of a publishing phenomenon. Not the new Harry Potter, but Oprah Winfrey's book club.

The talk-show host will announce her long-awaited pick on her show next Wednesday, nearly four months after revealing that she was bringing back her club and focusing on "classic" authors such as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.

"It's the book that brought back the Book Club," Winfrey said Friday in a statement about her upcoming selection. She had suspended her picks in April 2002, later saying she didn't have enough time to keep up monthly selections.

Fans will have plenty of time to read her comeback choice; the follow-up program will not air until the fall.

Winfrey had tentatively planned to name her club Traveling With the Classics. But a spokeswoman said it will be called, as it had been before, Oprah's Book Club. Winfrey is expected to make from three to five choices a year. The books likely will be written by both living and dead authors.

"The selections will be great books that have stood the test of time," said Winfrey spokeswoman Lisa Halliday.

The revival of Winfrey's club, coming just three days before the June 21 release of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," should prove more good news for the struggling publishing industry. Her choices, which most recently included Rohinton Mistry's "A Fine Balance" and Ann-Marie McDonald's "Fall on Your Knees," virtually guarantee hundreds of thousands of sales.

The book club started in 1996, with Jacquelyn Mitchard's "The Deep End of the Ocean" as Winfrey's first pick. The book was released with an initial printing of 100,000. Within a week of Winfrey's announcement, 640,000 copies were in print and the book moved up to No. 1 on the fiction best-seller lists of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

Winfrey made 46 picks before announcing her final pick, Toni Morrison's "Sula," in April 2002.

Others, including the "Today" show and "Good Morning America," started their own clubs after Winfrey pulled hers. But none approach the impact of Oprah's Book Club.

"She goes out on the line and says to her viewers, `I love this book, here are the reasons why I love this book, and here's why I want you to read this book.' That's the difference between her club and other clubs," said Paul Bogaards, executive director of publicity at Alfred A. Knopf, which recently had novels picked by the "Today" show (Sandra Cisneros' "Caramelo") and "Good Morning America" (Richard Price's "Samaritan").

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