The Current Book Club Choice

What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, by Pearl Cleage

This highly praised debut novel by a renowned African-American playwright/essayist is a gritty yet warm and inspiring story of hope, love, and homecoming. On learning she has the AIDS virus, Ava Johnson closes her beauty parlor in Atlanta and returns to her hometown in Michigan, devoting herself to counselling black girls in trouble. In the process she falls in love with a man convicted of murder.


Wally Lamb   Edwidge Danticat   Anna Quindlen   Alice Hoffman   Toni Morrison   Bill Cosby

I Know This Much Is True, by Wally Lamb

This powerfully written story of the strained relationship between identical twin brothers and their sordid family history tackles sin and redemption and the ways in which pride surrenders itself to humanity. From the acclaimed author of the bestseller She's Come Undone.


Breath, Eyes, Memory, by Edwidge Danticat

After living for twelve years with her aunt in an impoverished village in Haiti, Sophie Caco travels to New York City to live with a mother she does not remember. With Breath, Eyes, Memory, author Edwidge Danticat has created a vivid novel of mothers and daughters, exile and return, disgrace and honor.


Black and Blue, by Anna Quindlen

A stunning novel about a marriage that begins in passion and becomes violent, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and author of "Thinking Out Loud." Fran Benedetto tells a spellbinding story of how a passionate marriage became a nightmare, and what finally makes her run away to start a new life with her son, under a new name. Living in fear of discovery, yet also with increasing confidence, freedom, and hope, Fran unravels the complex threads of family, identity, and desire that shape a woman's life, even as she struggles to create a new one; and Quindlen writes with depth, humor, and insight about the real lives of men and women, the varieties of love, the deep bond between mother and child, the solace of family and friendship.

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ALSO BY ANNA QUINDLEN

Here on Earth, by Alice Hoffman

The author of such bestselling novels as Seventh Heaven and Practical Magic creates her most glorious fictional world to date in a spellbinding tale of love and obsession. After nearly 20 years of living in California, March Murray and her daughter Gwen return to March's small Massachusetts hometown. Thrust into the world of her past, March slowly comes to realize the complexity of the choices made by those around her, including Hollis, the boy she loved--now the man she can't seem to stay away from.

Movie rights have been acquired by Michael Douglas's company, Douglas/Reuther Productions.

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ALSO BY ALICE HOFFMAN

Paradise, by Toni Morrison

Morrison's eagerly awaited new novel -- her first since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 -- is extraordinary for its breathtaking drive, stylistic panache, and enlivening moral gravitas. Spanning the time from the Reconstruction to the 1970s, this powerful work deftly manipulates past, present, and future as it reveals the interior lives of the citizens of a fictional, all-black town called Paradise Four young women are brutally attacked in their home, nicknamed "The Convent." Each of singular provenance, they together suggest the vicissitudes of the era -- of the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the counter-culture, generational conflict. The inexorableness of the attack and efforts to avert it lie at the heart of "Paradise."


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Hey, hey, hey, it's Bill Cosby!!

"Little Books for Beginning Readers" is a new early reader series launched by the acclaimed actor and comedian. Little Bill, the star of the series, helps get Cosby's self-esteem building messages across. Honeywood's brightly colored illustrations, portraying domestic scenes in a folksy way, will add to young readers' enjoyment. Alvin Pouissant, M.D., contributed an introduction for parents.

Oprah will feature the first three installments to the series:


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So you want to sit at Oprah's table?

 First, you've got to read the book! Then, write to Oprah and tell her how the book affected you ... what did the characters mean to you, how did the story make you reflect on your own life ... she wants to know what the lasting impact is from having read the book. Did you love it? Did you hate it? This is your chance to tell her!

Oprah's Book Club
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