It's a new season for Oprah's on-air book club, and her first pick is a debut novel by Atlanta journalist/ playwright Pearl Cleage called What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day. The people at Avon Books couldn't be happier, as this novel was a house favorite when first published to stellar reviews last December. A starred PW called it "a work of intelligence and integrity," about African American women tackling AIDS, teenage motherhood, crack, joblessness and low self-esteem, and praised its "engaging plot with witty prose that's wonderfully free of clichés." The hardcover was launched with a 12-city national author tour (done mostly by train, as Cleage is phobic about flying) and a 13,600-copy first printing; before Oprah, that figure had gone up to 24,000. To meet the anticipated demand, following the Oprah announcement on September 25 Avon printed 650,00 copies of its trade paperback and an additional 30,000 of the hardcover edition. Plans were already in the works to reissue the book in November but Avon had to rush it to press upon the good news from Oprah. Cleage, a founding editor of the literary magazine Catalyst, counts among her writing experience several plays and essays, as well as features and columns for a variety of print venues. Ballantine/One World published a collection of her essays in 1993 called Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot. And, in a nice bit of serendipity, she profiled Oprah back in 1989 for Esssence magazine.