Cecilia Konchar Farr is Professor of English and Women's Studies at the College of St. Catherine and author of Reading Oprah: How Oprah's Book Club Changed the Way America Reads, also published by SUNY Press. Jaime Harker is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Writing Across the Curriculum at the University of Mississippi and author of America the Middlebrow: Women's Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars.

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Jaime Harker and Cecilia Konchar Farr

1. Oprah in the Public Library
Juliette Wells and Virginia Wells

2. Talking Readers
Cecilia Konchar Farr

3. Reading Religiously: The Ritual Practices of Oprah's Book Club
Kathryn Lofton

4. The Romance of Reading Like Oprah
Yung-Hsing Wu

5. Oprah's Book Selections: Teleliterature for The Oprah Winfrey Show
R. Mark Hall

6. Resisting Paradise: Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, and the  Middlebrow Audience
Michael Perry

7. Oprah's Book Club and the Politics of Cross-Racial Empathy
Kimberly Chabot Davis

8. Beware the Furrow of the Middlebrow: Searching for Toni Morrison's Paradise on The Oprah Winfrey Show
Timothy Aubry

9. "Did Isabel Allende Write This Book for Me?": Oprah's Book Club Reads Daughter of Fortune
Ana Patricia Rodríguez

10. The Trouble with Happy Endings: Conflicting Narratives in Oprah's Book Club
Kelley Penfield Lewis

11. Your Book Changed My Life: Everyday Literary Criticism and Oprah's Book Club
Kate Douglas

12. Correcting Oprah: Jonathan Franzen and the Uses of Literature in the Therapeutic Age
Kevin Quirk

13. The Way We Read Now: Oprah Winfrey, Intellectuals, and Democracy
Simon Stow

14. Everything Old Is New Again: Oprah's Book Club Returns with the Classics
Kathleen Rooney

Afterword: Oprah, James Frey, and the Problem of the Literary
Jaime Harker

List of Contributors
Oprah's Book Club List
Index