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Originally Posted by maleficent
There was another Oprah book that Oprah had it as a selection - then dropped it as a selection (the connections or the commitments or something like that - i think the author was jonathan franzen - the book sucked - whatever it was) but the publicity helped boost sales...
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Okay, I haven't read The Corrections, but Franzen is an extraordinarily well-respected writer, and there was an almost unanimous consensus among critics that the book was a major literary accomplishment--i.e., most people who know anything about literary fiction agree that the book did
not suck.
The problem was that when Oprah picked the book, Franzen worried that people would make assumptions about his book that he didn't necessarily want them to make, and he shared those concerns with members of the press. I'm not sure he ever flat-out refused the offer from Oprah, but he said some things that cast some of Oprah's previous picks as dubious, from a literary standpoint. That was why she withdrew the offer, I think...but I think they may have patched things up in the end; I don't know--but here's an article on the subject from Salon.com:
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2...y/index.html?x