Oprah's Book Club

[4] Al Greco, a Fordham University marketing professor, estimated the total sales of the 70 "Oprah editions" at over 55 million copies.

[1] The club has seen several literary controversies, such as Jonathan Franzen's public dissatisfaction with his novel, The Corrections, having been chosen by Winfrey,[1] and the incident of James Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces, being outed as almost entirety fabricated.

[6][7] The book club's first selection on September 17, 1996, was the then recently published novel The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard.

Winfrey returned to fiction with her 2007 selections of The Road by Cormac McCarthy in March and Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides in June.

[9] The October 2007 selection was Love in the Time of Cholera, a 1985 novel by Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel García Márquez, greatly furthering not only the influence of the author in North America, but that of his translator Edith Grossman.

[1] In Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America, Kathleen Rooney describes Winfrey as "a serious American intellectual who pioneered the use of electronic media, specifically television and the Internet, to take reading—a decidedly non-technological and highly individual act—and highlight its social elements and uses in such a way to motivate millions of erstwhile non-readers to pick up books.

"[11] Business Week stated: Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the Oprah phenomenon is how outsized her power is compared with that of other market movers.

[citation needed] At the show's conclusion in May 2011, Nielsen BookScan created a list of the top-10 bestsellers from the club's final 10 years (prior data was unavailable).

Scott Stossel, an editor at The Atlantic, wrote: There is something so relentlessly therapeutic, so consciously self-improving about the book club that it seems antithetical to discussions of serious literature.

Writing in The New York Times, author Verlyn Klinkenborg suggested that "lurking behind Mr. Franzen's rejection of Ms. Winfrey is an elemental distrust of readers, except for the ones he designates.

But as more accusations against the book surfaced, Winfrey invited Frey on the show to find out directly from him whether he had lied to her and her viewers.

During a heated live televised debate, Winfrey forced Frey to admit that he had indeed lied about spending time in jail, and that he had no idea whether he had two root canals without painkillers or not, despite devoting several pages to describing them in excruciating detail.

[23] New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote, "It was a huge relief, after our long national slide into untruth and no consequences, into Swift boating and swift bucks, into W.'s delusion and denial, to see the Empress of Empathy icily hold someone accountable for lying,"[24] and The Washington Post's Richard Cohen was so impressed by the confrontation, that he crowned Winfrey "Mensch of the Year.