Oprah Has Chosen A Million Little Pieces

Posted on September 23, 2005

Is Oprah stepping away from the classics? After her summer of Faulkner, she's decided that her next pick is A Million Little Pieces (Vintage) by James Frey. Publisher's Weekly reports:

After the three Faulkner novels she selected for the summer met with disappointing sales, Oprah's book club took a bold step away from the classics today, with the promise to "open doors to all books." In a departure from her usual emphasis on fiction, her new pick is James Frey's 2004 addiction memoir A Million Little Pieces. Yet the book also marks a return to her core themes, since Frey's account of his struggle to detox at age 23 after years of alchohol and drug abuse addresses a subject she often features.

Vintage/Anchor has printed 600,000 copies of Frey's paperback, though the imprint is expected to take major returns on the Faulkner boxed set it published last June. According to Nielsen Bookscan, the set has sold only 161,880 copies of its 500,000-copy announced first print. However that number doesn't include sales at Wal-Mart and other ID accounts that can account major sales.

The book has already hit #1 on Amazon.com's bestseller list. And it has one of the ickiest book covers to ever have an Oprah sticker stamped on it. If we didn't know better, we'd think it was a horror novel. What is that stuff on his hand? If it's a man, why does he have such a long fingernail on his thumb? If it's a woman, did she have some kind of industrial accident with a Martha Stewart cake-decorating kit? It's all most confusing.