GalleyCat and its readers have had a pretty good track record when it comes to predicting the books that Oprah Winfrey picks for her book club—we came this close to pegging Middlesex, and then a sharp-eyed reader totally nailed Love in the Time of Cholera last September. Since then, the show has been upping its security measures to keep us from finding out anything about its selections—the Amazon.com page for the book she’ll announce next week, for example, has practically no information at all. Over at BN.com, though, we learn that it’s a HarperCollins book, and that it appears to be debuting in trade paperback next week… and that it appears to have had a sticker price of $25.95 in hardcover and a large print paperback edition.
And that, friends, leads this observer to predict that we are looking at Edward P. Jones‘s short story collection All Aunt Hagar’s Children, first published in August 2006 and, as far as Amazon and can tell, not published in paperback yet.
Since nobody will speak about this on the record, as is standard where Oprah’s Book Club is concerned, we’ll just have to wait until September 19 to see if this prediction holds up. Great choice, though: Edward P. Jones is awesome.
(UPDATE: Enough people mentioned that they had bought a trade paperback of All Aunt Hagar’s Children in 2007 that poking around seemed to be in order, and, sure enough, there it is. However, for some odd reason, that edition did not come up in a Wednesday afternoon search for “Aunt Hagar’s Children” or “Edward P. Jones” at Amazon, and it wasn’t listed as an alternate edition on the Amazon pages for the hardcover and large print editions. It didn’t turn up unless one searched for the exact ISBN, in fact; over at the B&N website, it did turn up on the third page of an “Edward P. Jones” search, but, as with Amazon, you couldn’t find it referenced off the previous editions.)
(And, yes, that is weird.)