Bibliofemme News
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07/06/2005
Oprah picks Faulkner for summer book club
Oprah Winfrey has picked William Faulkner's three novels As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury and Light in August as her summer reading selection for her bookclub.
Winfrey announced that, 'if you haven't read Faulkner, you haven't been baptized as a real reader.' The books are to be read during June, July and August, respectively.
Within hours of the announcement Faulkner was the number two seller on Amazon.com, second only to the next Harry Potter book which goes on sale in July.
Publishers Weekly reported that publisher Vintage, a division of Random House, had already shipped 500,000 copies of the boxed set.
Oprah's book club began as a segment on Winfrey's television talk show in 1996 and she initially picked new novels rather than classics. An Oprah's Book Club logo on a novel's cover helped many of her picks garner sales of more than 1 million copies.
After Winfrey picked "East of Eden" in summer 2003, the book sold more than 1.2 million copies, and last year's summer pick, "Anna Karenina," sold more than 900,000, according to Publishers Weekly figures.
Faulkner was born in 1897 and spent most of his life in Oxford, Mississippi until his death in 1962. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949.
Considered his masterpiece, As I Lay Dying opens on a farm in Mississippi where Addie Bundren lies in bed watching her son build her coffin. The book is the story of her family's efforts to fulfill her last wish to be buried in her hometown.
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