Oprah Picks McCarthy's 'The Road'

by Charlotte Abbott, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 3/28/2007

The spirit moved Oprah to announce this morning that Cormac McCarthy's The Road is her second book club pick of 2007. "He is an intensely private author, who doesn't do tours or give blurbs, and doesn't usually do things like go on Oprah, but he will be doing his first-ever TV interview with me," she said on her show this morning. Anchor has rushed out 950,000 copies of the paperback, originally scheduled for September 2007.

McCarthy's widely acclaimed novel follows a father and son through a post-apocalypic world in which they're among the few survivors—a stark departure from the more uplifting fiction Oprah is most popularly identified with, and the three memoirs that were her last picks.

"I am passionate about this book," Oprah said. She did not hint at how dark the novel is, except by saying, "It's unusual for me to pick this" and that "it won't disappoint—unless you're like [O magazine editor at large] Gail King."

The announcement followed vignettes from a taped dinner with Sidney Poitier and a small group of audience members. Harper San Francisco reports 900,000 copies in print of the actor's 2000 memoir, The Measure of a Man, Winfrey's most recent selection.

Oprah's current choice of a title from Vintage—sister imprint to James Frey's paperback publisher Anchor within the Knopf Group—raises the possibility that she may have moved past her outrage over last year's Million Little Pieces memoir debacle.

No word yet from Harpo on whether there will be a summer book club pick this year. The last one was 2005's William Faulkner fiction trifecta, for which Vintage took heavy returns on its 500,000-copy printing of a boxed set.