Celebrity - Stephanie Smith on the return of Oprah Winfrey's maligned book club

Oprah's Book Club is back, and this time she is aiming to reach an international audience. The new club, tentatively called Travelling With the Classics, will feature classic works of literature in shows that originate from locations around the world. This, she says, is an open invitation to "every man and woman who reads". According to Oprah, taking time to read great works is "something that we owe ourselves". Really. When has Shakespeare or Dickens ever needed endorsement, least of all from Oprah (or the Big O, as she likes to call herself)?

Oprah's previous club helped transform unknown or obscure writers, such as Christina Schwartz, into American bestsellers. When her club was brought to an abrupt end in April 2002, Oprah explained that it had become "harder and harder to find books on a monthly basis that I feel absolutely compelled to share". To her live studio audience, however, she confessed that she was feeling saturated with contemporary fiction (a sentiment shared by many). She had spent the weekend rereading F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (what else) and she wanted to take time to revisit other classics.

No doubt publishers will welcome her comeback, not least because she encouraged a whole new readership for serious fiction. An endorsement from Oprah often led to publishers increasing their print runs for individual titles by as many as 500,000 copies. Here was a powerful, rich black woman, a television celebrity with cult status among a key American demographic, telling people to turn off their televisions and read.

But not everyone was happy. New York literary critics and some academics complained that she was trivialising literature. Oprah's choices were often sentimental and popular. She often made mistakes. For instance, she chose to support Paradise, the least accessible of Toni Morrison's novels, when she could have chosen, say, the superior Beloved or The Bluest Eye.

Among her critics was Scott Stossel who, in the Atlantic Unbound, wrote that her book club was "antithetical to discussion of serious literature". He argued that Oprah was using it "to help her readers Get Culture, as though Culture is something that can be doled out like Prozac or pay raises". More significantly, Jonathan Franzen reacted badly to having his novel The Corrections endorsed by Oprah.

The big orange O had become a symbol for everything that established, academic, literary America didn't want to be: middle class, Middle America, middlebrow, with a soft spot for anything home-grown and hard-won.

For a domestic audience of 26 million viewers, and with a wide-ranging international distribution of 106 countries, Oprah Winfrey has tried to make reading a shared experience. Her chat show, like the book circles that characterised the ante-bellum South, treats novels with the same seriousness that it treats religion, politics and fashion - something you think, feel and argue about passionately. The question is whether Oprahism will stand against the more enduring works of the canon. Whatever happens, she will, no doubt, irritate many.

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