It has been almost nine years since Jonathan Franzen hemmed and hawed about Oprah Winfrey's selection of his novel The Corrections for her book club, but is that long enough for hurt feelings to heal? According to rumors, it is. Melville House publisher Dennis Johnson has reported that Oprah is going to make Franzen's Freedom her latest pick on Friday. Johnson has also posted a photo that seems to prove him right. That Oprah sticker might still make Franzen fairly itch with ambivalence, but he'll be scratching his all the way to the bank. Meanwhile, the Franzenfreude will surely increase, and with good reason: As Meghan O'Rourke writes in Slate, the underlying issue is an important one: "Namely, why women are so infrequently heralded as great novelists."
Susan Lehman (no relation to Bookforum's Chris Lehmann) has been selected to become Jonathan Karp's replacement as the publisher of Twelve books, which has brought us titles such as Sebastian Junger's War and Christopher Hitchens's Hitch-22.
David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel, The Pale King, now has a cover design and a release date. Excited yet?
Letters written by Oscar Wilde to a magazine editor have been discovered. Though the quotes we've seen don't quite merit the term "love letters," they are sweet, and certainly flirtatious: "Afterwards we will smoke cigarettes and Talk over the Journalistic article, could we go to your rooms, I am so far off, and clubs are difficult to Talk in."
Via the Poetry Foundation: Elif Batuman has written an excellent review of Mark McGurl's The Program Era, which studies how MFA writing programs have changed postwar literature.
