Oprah's Picks - where are they now? pt.3

This is the 3rd and final installment of this multi-part peek into authors whose books were picked to be included in Oprah's book club and what they've been doing in the years since their selection.

Starting in 2002 and running into 2005, Oprah actually moved away from contemporary titles and on to classics for her book picks. In that time she picked 9 titles of American and world literature. There was a lot of skepticism around the move, but Oprah's fame and personality brought a lot of readers to books that previously were the stuff of high school and university course lists.

East of Eden
by John Steinbeck
Cry, The Beloved Country
by Alan Paton
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers
Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
The Good Earth
by Pearl S. Buck
Light in August, The Sound and the Fury
and As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

All of those authors except one are deceased, so there is little to tell about them in terms of updates. The one living author is Gabriel García Márquez who has published both a memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, and a novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores in the year's since his Oprah selection. Oprah selected another of his older titles - Love in the Time of Cholera - for her book club in 2007.

I feel like I don't even need to tell you about what has happened to the contemporary author who Oprah next selected for inclusion in the book club - the inclusion of James Frey's book A Million Little Pieces in 2005 has become so infamous, it's difficult to imagine you haven't already heard about it. In a nutshell, after Oprah's endorsement of the memoir, it was revealed that much of what was presented as truth in the memoir, was actually untrue. Oprah's own website has a section devoted to the controversy. In 2007 a lawsuit was settled that offered money back to readers who were upset by the controversy. Despite the troubles, Frey is still writing - although his 2008 release Bright Shiny Morning is a novel.

We'll finish in 2006, when Oprah's only pick was Elie Wiesel's novel based on his experience during the Holocaust, Night. Published originally in 1958 in Yiddish and then translated into French and English a few years later, but Oprah's selection brought the book back into focus and onto bestseller lists. Since the Oprah inclusion, Wiesel has published a biography of an important historical Rabbi Rashi and another novel, A Mad Desire to Dance. Wiesel has a yet another forthcoming novel - The Sonderberg Case (which is a mystery) is due this August.

Oprah has of course continued her book club since 2006 ... if you want to know more about those authors and her current picks, visit her website.

Oprah's Picks - where are they now? Part 2.

In December, I did a post looking back at some of the early picks in Oprah Winfrey's Book Club and what the authors whose books were chosen have been up to since. Oprah's Book Club has been running since 1996, and the current selection (Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan) is #63: that's a lot of books and a lot of authors. In my last post, I promised a continuation .... here it is!

We'll pick this post up in 2000, a year of almost exclusively American fiction picks, with one notable exception: Daughter of Fortune (Hija de la Fortuna) by Chilean author Isabel Allende. This historical novel tells the story of young woman who travels from Chile to the United States during the height of the California Gold Rush. Allende was already a well know and respected author in 2000, but in the years since her selection by Oprah, Allende's reputation as a writer has only grown. She has published both fiction and memoirs in the last few years - including My Invented Country - a memoir of her life as a Chilean living in exile. Her fiction is frequently compared to another well known South American author - Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, in part because both authors are associated with magic realism. Her most recent novel is La isla bajo el mar- another historical piece. Released in Spanish last summer, the English version Island Beneath The Sea is due in April.


In 2001, Oprah began to slow with her selections but there were a few notable picks. For Canadians, the inclusion of Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance caused a big stir. Having won the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Award previously, the book was already well known - particularly in Commonwealth countries, but its inclusion made the author a household name in America. Although A Fine Balance had already been on bookstore shelves for 6 odd years, Mistry's follow up Family Matters, came out soon after. Mistry's most recent work is The Scream - a short story published with illustrations by Tony Urquhart.


2001 was also notable for a book that didn't become a part of Oprah's Book Club (sort of): The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Announced as a pick for the book club in the fall of 2001, Franzen's appearance on the show was canceled after he reportedly expressed concerns about the branding that comes with being an Oprah book. (In case you forget the details, here's a link to a People.com story about the whole thing.) The book was a bestseller and a National Book Award winner, and still remains in the archives of Oprah's selections, but was never discussed on the show as other titles have been. Franzen has published two books of nonfiction since, a collection of essays How to Be Alone and a memoir The Discomfort Zone (both of which seem aptly titled in light of the whole Oprah debacle). There's finally some light at the end of the tunnel for fans of Franzen's fiction: his next novel Freedom has a tentative release date for September of this year.


We'll finish this edition in 2002, the year that Oprah decided to put her book club on hiatus for awhile. In that year she picked only two books - Sula by Toni Morrison and (her second book by a Canadian author) Fall On Your Knees by Ann Marie MacDonald. MacDonald has been active in the years since, although not necessarily in terms of writing. She spent 7 years hosting the CBC television program Life and Times and now hosts The Doc Zone. Despite being busy with a TV career, MacDonald still found time to pen a second novel, 2003's The Way the Crow Flies, and has also published the play Belle Moral - a reworked version of her earlier play The Arab's Mouth. Although it's been more than a decade since the original release of Fall On Your Knees, the epic Cape Breton set novel is still much in the minds of readers. It will be debated this year on CBC's Canada Reads program.

Oprah's Picks - where are they now? Part 1

As the year comes to a close and people and news sources are putting together their best of lists - I've gotten to thinking about books that have had lots of media attention in the past and wondering where those authors are now. In particular, I've been thinking about Oprah's Book Club Picks. Oprah's Book Club has been making household names out of the authors whose books are chosen for the club since 1996. However, for the most part Oprah only ever picks one book by an author (two exceptions are Toni Morrison - whose books Oprah has picked 4 times - and Wally Lamb, whom she has selected twice) - so what happens when the spotlight is turned away, or more simply - where are these authors now?

Oprah started her book club in 1996 with Deep End of the Ocean by Jacqueline Mitchard about an already troubled woman whose child goes missing. The novel was also the author's first, and surely a much helpful boost to Mitchard's profile. Mitchard has been busy since 1996, continuing to publish successful (although not nearly as successful as her first) novels of contemporary fiction and branching out into books for children and teens as well. Her website describes her 2006 book Cage of Stars - about a young girl dealing with the aftermath of witnessing her sisters being killed - as "her most critically acclaimed novel". This year she released a sequel to Deep End of the Ocean called No Time to Wave Goodbye.

A selection from 1997 was Ursula Hegi's German set, historical fiction novel Stones From the River. Hegi already had several books and accolades under her belt when Oprah made her selection, but certainly the inclusion in the club increased her fame and sales of a book that had already been out 3 years. Like Mitchard, Hegi is still busy writing and has published several well regarded books. Her most recent was 2007's

The Worst Thing I've Done, which Kirkus described as "grim, gripping fiction ... about childhood friends whose triangular relationship goes horribly wrong".

In 1998, Oprah highlighted another first novel with her selection of Edwidge Danticat's 1994 Breath, Eyes, Memory. By '98, the Haitian American author was already developing a strong following among critics and readers through reaction to her book of short stories Krik? Krak! and was just about to release a second novel called The Farming of Bones - all of which feature the experience of life in Haiti prominently. Danticat's reputation continues to grow: her 2007 memoir Brother, I'm Dying won the National Book Critics Circle Award and in 2009 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (AKA a genius grant).

One more for this post (we'll continue in further ones)... In 1999, Oprah picked a recently released first novel from author Breena Clarke called River, Cross My Heart. Historical fiction described by the Oprah website as "a novel of tragedy and triumph in the life of an African American family in Georgetown, circa 1925." Clarke hasn't been prolific but she has produced a follow-up novel - more historical fiction that focuses on the lives of African Americans called Stand the Storm. Well reviewed and nominated for the 2009 Hurston/Wright Foundation's Legacy Award.

Clarke is another author to keep an eye on.