Oprah Taps Eugenides
-- Publishers Weekly, 6/5/2007 6:00:00 AM
Word that Jeffrey Eugenides’ 2003 novel Middlesex would be Oprah’s next Book Club pick trickled out last weekend, as hundreds of booksellers gathered at Book Expo. Some received their shipments of the $15 paperback last week, and were warned by Picador not to open their cartons until after today’s official announcement on the show.
With sales to date of more than 1 million copies of Middlesex in paperback, according to Nielsen Bookscan, Picador is likely to have gone back to press for 750,000 copies or more, though publisher Frances Coady has refused to comment. That makes Eugenides’ 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning story of a Greek American girl who becomes a teenage boy in 1970s Detroit considerably more popular than most books chosen for Oprah’s club.
