Oprah Winfrey (Getty Images)

The Hollywood Reporter brings us news of Oprah Winfrey's latest television venture--and it's not for her gradually improving cable network OWN. Her Harpo Films banner is producing an untitled drama about a black college president who attracts controversy on a national level.

As she prepares to work with a new network entirely, Ms. Winfrey has seen her network grow a bit as she's returned to interviewing celebrities on the Oprah's Next Chapter series. And she's been frank about the growing pains, recently telling Harper's Bazaar that she reads responses to her Sunday-morning series on the network, "And when I say I read your Facebook response, I can because there are 28 of them."

Jason Russell

Jason Russell, the director whose "Kony 2012" video went viral this spring prior to Mr. Russell's arrest for alleged public masturbation and vandalism, is to re-emerge with an interview on the October 7 episode of OWN's Oprah's Next Chapter. It's a next chapter for Mr. Russell, too, whose alleged that he had a breakdown not due to drugs or alcohol but sudden and extreme fame (the first "Kony" video, calling attention to an African warlord, has gotten some 92 million views).

(Image via WritersWrite.com)

Book publishers got a pleasant surprise this weekend when Oprah Winfrey announced she has relaunched her influential book club—the imprimatur of debatable literary value (Jonathan Franzen famously sniffed at it) that can drive enough sales to put an obscure author on the map or keep an imprint in the black. (Mr. Franzen came crawling back for his next novel.)

As Ms. Winfrey tells it, she had to bring back the club because she loved Cheryl Strayed's hiking memoir Wild so much. 

"I was on the edge of my seat reading the book," Ms. Winfrey said in the announcement video below, posted on Friday. "I was like, 'Where is the Oprah Winfrey Show when you need to announce and tell everybody about this book? [You canceled it in order to start your own cable channel, Ms. Winfrey!] I need Book Club. So I created Book Club 2.0 for this book."

Ms. Strayed's story of loss and survival does seem tailor-made for Oprah's Book Club and, as our own Drew Grant pointed out, Ms. Strayed's popular advice column at The Rumpus, "Dear Sugar," has already made her the Oprah of the Internet.

The "2.0" means that Ms. Strayed will be interacting with Oprah Book Club members on Twitter and Facebook and that a special Oprah's Book Club ebook version will include Ms. Winfrey's marginalia.

The Book Club 2.0 will be promoted on the poorly rated Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) and in O: The Oprah Magazine, making it an  interesting measure of Ms. Winfrey's post-network television influence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mzxOioEisWo

Bloomberg Businessweek

OWN has suffered what might be more significant than growing pains--its initial ratings were a paltry 308,000 daily viewers--though it's lately seen a resurgence thanks to the interview program Oprah's Next Chapter. After OWN's cancellation of Rosie O'Donnell's nightly talk show and its struggle connecting with non-Winfrey unscripted series, the prescription may be more Oprah.

Photo by Ricardo Barros

Woe betide our republic of letters! The shadowy culture arbiters who serve on the Pulitzer Prize board have withheld their favor from the field of American novels published in 2011. Booksellers, writers and critics have been up in arms ever since news of the non-award broke in mid-April. In a cri de coeur published in the New York Times’s op-ed pages, novelist Ann Patchett—who also runs an independent bookstore in Nashville—decried the committee’s abstention as a cause for “indignation” and, indeed, “rage.”

“I can’t imagine there was ever a year when we were so in need of the excitement the [fiction Pulitzer] creates in readers,” Ms. Patchett wrote.

It’s easy to miss, amid Ms. Patchett’s vehemence, the patent condescension that prize-dependent marketing visits upon American readers. In her distinctly arid account of readerly engagement, news of a prestigious laurel is what’s needed to generate “the buzz,” as she puts it, “that is so often lacking.” But the question is far better turned on its head: If an entire industry must rely on aloof prize boards to gin up sustained interest, then the trouble would seem to be the industry itself, rather than the prize boards or the consumers.

This was, after all, the identical argument that publishing executives trotted out in favor of Oprah Winfrey’s relentlessly middle-brow book club when Dame Oprah threatened its retirement, and when Jonathan Franzen sullied it with his sniveling high-brow criticisms: If we sacrifice Oprah’s market-making might, then surely the sky will fall! the collective wail then went; without patient tutelage from the sovereign of daytime talk, it was thought, Americans would revert to simply using books to squash bugs or prop open their outhouse windows. In reality, of course, publishers survived the withdrawn patronage of the Big O just fine—and far from being starved for reliable advice, readers can glean literary recommendations, opinions and argument from a wider range of sources than ever, thanks largely to the explosion of online literary sites.

Funnily enough, the brunt of Ms. Patchett’s indictment was being disproved even as it was published: Thanks to the coverage surrounding the non-awarding of the 2012 Pulitzer, sales of all three finalists werespiking; one of those titles, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, had even sold out in hardcover on Amazon. (My own informal canvass of half-a-dozen Manhattan bookstores last week likewise failed to turn up a single copy of Train Dreams.) These initial returns suggested two healthy correctives to the general publishers’ alarm. First, self-generated debate over literary judgments, even of the sort kicked up by this gnat-straining controversy, is at least as capable of sparking book sales as a ceremonial annual honor. And second, it’s generally far healthier for three books to occupy the center of said debate than a single fawned-over honoree—in pretty much the same way that it’s a far greater civic boon to have three political parties than one.

But there are other, more fundamental reasons to look askance at the business of award-driven fiction. The kind of literary consensus championed by Ms. Patchett tends to work as a de facto restraint on trade in the marketplace of ideas. That is to say, to the extent that readers look to prizes to arbitrate their own tastes, the already cloistered enterprise of literary fiction narrows further, to a charmed circle of writers publishing works by, for and about the types of people who pursue and win literary prizes. Take two highly praised novels of the past year that didn’t place as Pulitzer finalists but have earned lavish attention as prize-worthy works: Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot. Both are studies in star-crossed individuation among a cloistered intellectual class; and as befits the earlier fictional traditions each novel cribs widely from, they hew closely to gender stereotype, with The Marriage Plot’s Madeleine Hanna embarking on a lifelong quest for a satisfying love relationship, and Mr. Harbach’s protagonist, Henry Skrimshander, finding metaphysical repose in old-fashioned male camaraderie and the pursuit of excellence on the baseball diamond. In a very different register, David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published and Pulitzer-nominated novel, The Pale King, projects the self-aware, multilayered quest for authentic experience onto the lumbering federal bureaucracy of the IRS, fragmenting the author’s own identity across the book’s unfinished pages.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with literate, knowing fiction revolving around the inner lives of articulate young achievers—and Messrs. Eugenides, Wallace and Harbach all render the central struggles of their protagonists with narrative assurance. Still, nearly all the action in these signature 2011 fictions takes place through a distracting scrim of writerly meditation on writing, which tends to leave readers feeling a bit obtrusive. Wallace’s corps of IRS auditors, toiling earnestly away behind their desks and pencils in the 1980s, are clearly stand-ins for the authors of fiction, casting about for some deeper sense of meaning amid an American entertainment public, that, much like the taxpaying clientele in The Pale King, has little use for their efforts. Mr. Harbach’s ballplayers likewise are perfecting a militantly counterutilitarian pride of craft—and are surrounded by a raft of allusions to the work of Herman Melville, for good measure. Meanwhile, The Marriage Plot is so steeped in obsessive MFA-style self-examination that it derives its title from Madeleine’s senior English thesis on the Victorian novel.

This isn’t the first time, by the way, that the Pulitzer committee has taken a flyer on the fiction award—the Prize has gone unclaimed on 10 prior occasions, the last time in 1977. And indeed, the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for fiction was widely perceived as a make-up laurel. In 1918, the committee gave the prize to the radical proletarian novelist Ernest Poole for a book called His Family. It was commonly understood, though, that the Pulitzer board was actually honoring Poole’s far better 1915 novel, The Harbor, which chronicled a journalist’s conversion to the working-class cause amid a general strike that paralyzed New York Harbor. As he ponders the fateful step toward radical commitment, Billy, the novel’s narrator, proposes forsaking his successful career lionizing the age’s industrial titans in favor of something in a more social realist vein. Seeking to sum up his mounting distress to his wife—the daughter of one of Billy’s model captains of industry—he conjures the appeal of his next big journalistic subject: “Poverty, that’s what it is, and I’ve always steered way clear of it as though I were afraid to look. I’ve taken your father’s point of view and left the slums for him and his friends to tackle when they get the time. I was only too glad to be left out. But … I’m beginning to wonder now why I shouldn’t get up the nerve to see for myself, to have a good big look at it all.”

His wife, Eleanore, takes emphatic exception to the plan. “Her voice was so sharp it startled me,” Billy recounts: “‘You’re different,’ she answered. ‘You leave poverty alone and force yourself to go on with your work. You’ve made a very wonderful start. You’ll be ready to take up fiction soon.’”

]]>

Photo by Ricardo Barros

Woe betide our republic of letters! The shadowy culture arbiters who serve on the Pulitzer Prize board have withheld their favor from the field of American novels published in 2011. Booksellers, writers and critics have been up in arms ever since news of the non-award broke in mid-April. In a cri de coeur published in the New York Times’s op-ed pages, novelist Ann Patchett—who also runs an independent bookstore in Nashville—decried the committee’s abstention as a cause for “indignation” and, indeed, “rage.”

“I can’t imagine there was ever a year when we were so in need of the excitement the [fiction Pulitzer] creates in readers,” Ms. Patchett wrote.

It’s easy to miss, amid Ms. Patchett’s vehemence, the patent condescension that prize-dependent marketing visits upon American readers. In her distinctly arid account of readerly engagement, news of a prestigious laurel is what’s needed to generate “the buzz,” as she puts it, “that is so often lacking.” But the question is far better turned on its head: If an entire industry must rely on aloof prize boards to gin up sustained interest, then the trouble would seem to be the industry itself, rather than the prize boards or the consumers.

This was, after all, the identical argument that publishing executives trotted out in favor of Oprah Winfrey’s relentlessly middle-brow book club when Dame Oprah threatened its retirement, and when Jonathan Franzen sullied it with his sniveling high-brow criticisms: If we sacrifice Oprah’s market-making might, then surely the sky will fall! the collective wail then went; without patient tutelage from the sovereign of daytime talk, it was thought, Americans would revert to simply using books to squash bugs or prop open their outhouse windows. In reality, of course, publishers survived the withdrawn patronage of the Big O just fine—and far from being starved for reliable advice, readers can glean literary recommendations, opinions and argument from a wider range of sources than ever, thanks largely to the explosion of online literary sites.

Funnily enough, the brunt of Ms. Patchett’s indictment was being disproved even as it was published: Thanks to the coverage surrounding the non-awarding of the 2012 Pulitzer, sales of all three finalists werespiking; one of those titles, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, had even sold out in hardcover on Amazon. (My own informal canvass of half-a-dozen Manhattan bookstores last week likewise failed to turn up a single copy of Train Dreams.) These initial returns suggested two healthy correctives to the general publishers’ alarm. First, self-generated debate over literary judgments, even of the sort kicked up by this gnat-straining controversy, is at least as capable of sparking book sales as a ceremonial annual honor. And second, it’s generally far healthier for three books to occupy the center of said debate than a single fawned-over honoree—in pretty much the same way that it’s a far greater civic boon to have three political parties than one.

But there are other, more fundamental reasons to look askance at the business of award-driven fiction. The kind of literary consensus championed by Ms. Patchett tends to work as a de facto restraint on trade in the marketplace of ideas. That is to say, to the extent that readers look to prizes to arbitrate their own tastes, the already cloistered enterprise of literary fiction narrows further, to a charmed circle of writers publishing works by, for and about the types of people who pursue and win literary prizes. Take two highly praised novels of the past year that didn’t place as Pulitzer finalists but have earned lavish attention as prize-worthy works: Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot. Both are studies in star-crossed individuation among a cloistered intellectual class; and as befits the earlier fictional traditions each novel cribs widely from, they hew closely to gender stereotype, with The Marriage Plot’s Madeleine Hanna embarking on a lifelong quest for a satisfying love relationship, and Mr. Harbach’s protagonist, Henry Skrimshander, finding metaphysical repose in old-fashioned male camaraderie and the pursuit of excellence on the baseball diamond. In a very different register, David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published and Pulitzer-nominated novel, The Pale King, projects the self-aware, multilayered quest for authentic experience onto the lumbering federal bureaucracy of the IRS, fragmenting the author’s own identity across the book’s unfinished pages.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with literate, knowing fiction revolving around the inner lives of articulate young achievers—and Messrs. Eugenides, Wallace and Harbach all render the central struggles of their protagonists with narrative assurance. Still, nearly all the action in these signature 2011 fictions takes place through a distracting scrim of writerly meditation on writing, which tends to leave readers feeling a bit obtrusive. Wallace’s corps of IRS auditors, toiling earnestly away behind their desks and pencils in the 1980s, are clearly stand-ins for the authors of fiction, casting about for some deeper sense of meaning amid an American entertainment public, that, much like the taxpaying clientele in The Pale King, has little use for their efforts. Mr. Harbach’s ballplayers likewise are perfecting a militantly counterutilitarian pride of craft—and are surrounded by a raft of allusions to the work of Herman Melville, for good measure. Meanwhile, The Marriage Plot is so steeped in obsessive MFA-style self-examination that it derives its title from Madeleine’s senior English thesis on the Victorian novel.

This isn’t the first time, by the way, that the Pulitzer committee has taken a flyer on the fiction award—the Prize has gone unclaimed on 10 prior occasions, the last time in 1977. And indeed, the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for fiction was widely perceived as a make-up laurel. In 1918, the committee gave the prize to the radical proletarian novelist Ernest Poole for a book called His Family. It was commonly understood, though, that the Pulitzer board was actually honoring Poole’s far better 1915 novel, The Harbor, which chronicled a journalist’s conversion to the working-class cause amid a general strike that paralyzed New York Harbor. As he ponders the fateful step toward radical commitment, Billy, the novel’s narrator, proposes forsaking his successful career lionizing the age’s industrial titans in favor of something in a more social realist vein. Seeking to sum up his mounting distress to his wife—the daughter of one of Billy’s model captains of industry—he conjures the appeal of his next big journalistic subject: “Poverty, that’s what it is, and I’ve always steered way clear of it as though I were afraid to look. I’ve taken your father’s point of view and left the slums for him and his friends to tackle when they get the time. I was only too glad to be left out. But … I’m beginning to wonder now why I shouldn’t get up the nerve to see for myself, to have a good big look at it all.”

His wife, Eleanore, takes emphatic exception to the plan. “Her voice was so sharp it startled me,” Billy recounts: “‘You’re different,’ she answered. ‘You leave poverty alone and force yourself to go on with your work. You’ve made a very wonderful start. You’ll be ready to take up fiction soon.’”

]]> http://observer.com/2012/04/read-it-and-whine-writers-dont-need-prizes-they-need-ideas/feed/ 0 jhanasobserver Eugenides(MarriagePlot) Ricardo Barros http://observer.com/2012/02/adele-not-too-fat-forvogue/#comments Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:24:34 -0400 http://observer.com/2012/02/adele-not-too-fat-forvogue/ Kat Stoeffel http://www.observer.com/?p=220592 In a rare moment of web savvy, Conde Nast fashion flagship Vogue posted its March cover story about Adele this morning at midnight, just a few hours after the British singer swept the six Grammy awards for which she was nominated.

Unfortunately, the profile delivers little in the way of revelation (much less than Anderson Cooper's 60 Minutes piece) unless you count the very original theory that Adele's personal life and lyrics can be explained by her absentee father.

Jonathan van Meter wrote:

"Perhaps it’s too easy to assume that Adele’s compulsion to find and keep a man, not to mention her attraction to older men, is all part of a daddy complex, but it is tempting nonetheless. The fact that she so exquisitely expresses her heartbreak over the loss and betrayal of men in her life through her music may very well be because she’s been feeling that loss and betrayal since she was a child."

To her credit, the 23 year-old singer handled the allegation with charming self-effacement:

“I have no idea where it comes from. I don’t read literature. I don’t have a very big capacity for language and words. I’m quite limited when it comes to just chatting. But my head comes alive when I’m writing music, and I start using words and describing emotions I had no idea existed in me.”

More disturbing to us is the fact that Adele spends the profile hanging out in riding boots made by Chanel. Last week, Chanel designer and Metro guest editor Karl Lagerfeld declared Adele "the thing at the moment"--this despite the fact that "she is a little too fat."

"I lost over 30 kilos over 10 years ago and have kept it off," Mr. Lagerfeld later offered, by way of apology. "I know how it feels when the press is mean to you in regards to your appearance."

Of course, after one has sat for her first Vogue cover (and without being ordered by editor Anna Wintour to lose weight for it, no less), a dig from the free subway newspaper has little impact.

"I've never wanted to look like models on the cover of magazines," Adele told People magazine in response to his comments. "I represent the majority of women and I'm very proud of that."

In 2009, Ms. Wintour styled Adele for the Grammys, and she was escorted by Hamish Bowles.

We hope Adele loses the boots and writes Mr. Lagerfeld off as free material for the next album. Who needs ex-boyfriends when there are fashion fascists?

Rosie O'Donnell (Getty Images)

We’re here to tell you just how to set your DVR before heading out for drinks or dinner–or just watching something better on TV!

We haven't watched Rosie O'Donnell's nightly show on the Oprah Winfrey Network--her humor, predicated always on a lot of Hollywood references, seems to have devolved into just saying the names of people or movies or TV shows and then being like, "stupid, right?" She's the hashtag rap of celebrity comedians. Tonight sees Kathy Griffin's appearance on The Rosie Show, and it's a rare occasion on which we might be tempted to watch: Ms. Griffin's humor is very similar, but backed up by the occasional spicy anecdote of behind-the-scenes celebrity behavior. Ms. O'Donnell will either push her for some intriguing gossip--or sit back and let invective fly without much in the way of context or joke-construction. Either way, it'll be a trainwreck we might DVR, just so we can say we've seen the not-terribly-inspiring crown jewel in Oprah's empire of feminine inspiration.

Set your DVR for OWN at 7pm to record The Rosie Show.

As a programmer and producer, not all Oprah touches turns to gold: while Doctors Oz and Phil both have done very well in syndication, Nate Berkus's ratings have struggled to the degree that Dr. Oz engaged in a "crossover episode." One imagines that the end of her own daily show, in May, will come as a welcome respite--to allow her to organize the rest of her kingdom.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

If we assume, given that Friends began in 1994, that Aniston was being cast for that season, she'd have joined an SNL cast including Mike Myers, Norm MacDonald, and (briefly) Janeane Garofalo. There were only three women on the cast at any time--Molly Shannon came in as Garofalo left, and Morwenna Banks and Ellen Cleghorne served time as well. Does Aniston fit in there? Per the oral history Live from New York, Kudrow tried out for the show in the early 1990s and was rejected--this never came up before now?

Aniston certainly landed on her feet, whatever the true story is--during Friends's blockbuster first season, New York ran its infamous "Saturday Night Dead" story. But by now, SNL is such a venerable brand, Lorne Michaels such a once-again-beloved figure, that even the name of the show lends a star a certain cachet. Why host the show when you can say you almost starred on it? NBC representatives were unavailable to comment on the story, but consider Aniston's answer to the direct question of whether Lorne Michaels offered her a job:

Yeah. I was...you know, I had this show 'Friends' coming up, and I thought...yeah...They thought I was making a huge mistake.

Mm, direct! Aniston's made us think she's funnier and made us think her career has been a huge success, all while promoting an unfunny-looking comedy that likely won't improve her career. She's a genius of self-promotion, if not sketch comedy: no wonder she outlasted Morwenna Banks.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Today's events prove that time heals all lit-feud wounds. Franzen appeared on Oprah's show to discuss Freedom and from the outset both seemed intent to belie any concern for lingering tension -- in fact they were downright congenial to each other. Franzen may be the most hallowed literary figure to appear of the show since Cormac McCarthy's rare appearance in 2007, and the AP has a brief report on the landmark moment in Oprah's Book Club history.

"Bottom line is, I'm happy to have you," Winfrey said.

"I'm happy to be here," Franzen replied.

Winfrey said in September that she read "Freedom" after Franzen sent her a copy during the summer along with a note. She said she considered it a "tour de force" after the first chapter and called it a "masterpiece."

Flavorwire has a few more quotes from the interview, including this gem from Franzen about meeting President Obama.

“I got summoned to the White House. Someone told me that I had 20 minutes with Obama, which I was told was an eternity. And it kind of felt like one, I mean what do you talk about? I said, ‘You’re my hero,’ and that left 19 minutes and 45 seconds.”

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234