Juniper Song, the protagonist of Rebecca F. Kuang’s bestselling novel Yellowface, takes the literary world by storm when her historical novel The Last Front comes out. In the wake of her massive critical and commercial success, Song then publishes the slim novella Mother Witch to a more modest reception, with reviews in the leading papers and magazines praising the literary qualities of her sophomore effort. In this context, Kuang follows Juniper Song’s thoughts as she ponders the next steps to further monetize Mother Witch via cross-media adaptation:
I’m already thinking about the next contract, about possible film options for current properties. Maybe Mother Witch isn’t blockbuster material, but you could make a quiet prestige TV series with it. Something like Big Little Lies, or Little Fires Everywhere. Someone call Reese Witherspoon to produce. Someone tap Amy Adams to play the mother. Someone tap Anna Kendrick to play me.
Rattling off these names, Yellowface’s fictional protagonist appears thoroughly attuned to today’s actual literary marketplace. Juniper Song intuitively computes the symbolic capital her second book accrues via reviews and recommendations, perceiving the potential to convert this into hard dollars via film or television deals.
Song’s clear-sighted market sense extends to the various institutions propelling her career, and she also has a very distinct idea of which industry person might be the ideal fit for her “current properties”: Reese Witherspoon. Kuang has her protagonist call out Witherspoon not in the latter’s more high-profile role as a Hollywood actor but as a seasoned TV producer for female-centered storytelling. As if Kuang had manifested this collaboration, Reese Witherspoon indeed became a crucial figure for the rise of the publishing satire Yellowface to bestsellerdom in the anglophone literary market. Witherspoon boosted the book’s sales in her capacity as head of an online book club called Reese’s Book Club (RBC), which selected Yellowface as its July 2023 monthly pick, lending the novel additional publicity and a symbolic stamp of institutional approval (paired with a visible stamp on several editions of the book’s glaring yellow cover). In the passage from Yellowface quoted above, Kuang exposes the institutional and economic structures of the contemporary US literary field. Her hyperaware narrator-focalizer Juniper Song may lack the decisive literary talent, but she makes up for it through a professionalized grasp of all the key players who may help her advance in the literary world.
We use this peculiar confluence of literary reflexivity and institutional alignment as a springboard into a wider inquiry centered on the role of Reese Witherspoon’s book club in the contemporary literary sphere. We take seriously the implications of reading novels not as singular works but as installments in a serial, social reading community, arguing that RBC through its selections and its manifold paratexts tells an institutional story—a book club metanarrative—that provides a unique framing of the contemporary anglophone publishing field. This book club metanarrative provides the self-description of RBC as it emerges from the sum total of discursive elements that readers are exposed to if they regularly engage with the club’s selections and follow its paratextual outlets (especially its Instagram account and email newsletter). RBC frames its metanarrative on its website in two mantra-like declarations:
Women: May we write them truer, raise them higher, and read them here. . . . We are Reese’s Book Club: The seekers of joy, The lovers of story, The Keepers of fictive kin, and through The Readership We dive deeper, Go further, And give more To co-author louder, greater, prouder, A Truer, Newer Narrative for Women.
These declarations center readerly agency, female empowerment, and diversity (via the targeted initiative “The Readership”). Accounting for such explicit framings and digging deep into the club’s textual and paratextual archives, this essay combines approaches from book and publishing studies with literary-critical analysis to explore the contours of RBC in its first seven-odd years.
Our inquiry is embedded within wider conversations and reorientations regarding the institutional settings of contemporary anglophone literature. In what Jeremy Rosen dubs the “institutional turn,” literary studies scholarship has recently paid increasing attention to the mediating actors and collectives that affect the creation and distribution of literature.1 Most work in this arena has focused on the publishing industry, with a 2021 special issue of American Literary History edited by Lee Konstantinou and Dan Sinykin on publishing and contemporary literature as one of the most visible outgrowths.2 As Simone Murray (Digital), Jim Collins, Sarah Brouillette (Literature), and others stress, the contemporary literary sphere thoroughly enmeshes forms of symbolic and economic capital and reconfigures how readers approach literary culture. We take direction from Murray’s work on the digital literary sphere and the adaptation industry. This work productively updates Bourdieu’s ideas on the literary field given that online spaces render “the actual functioning of cultural brokerage more transparent and more readily documentable than ever before” (Murray, Digital 18). A century ago, as Janice Radway shows, the Book-of-the-Month Club first started to sell quality books in an unabashedly commercial monthly installment mode as if they were “ephemeral magazines” (152). RBC and its many cousins update this serial dimension for the era of social media, yoking together disparate texts in a predictable chronological pattern amid the umbrella of a parasocial community of readers.
Compared with the large body of scholarship on individual publishing houses and on systemic questions about the publishing industry, the extant scholarship on anglophone book clubs is smaller, but there are several notable studies.3 To be sure, the term “book club” has somewhat ambiguous meanings in the book industry and in popular culture (Norrick-Rühl 5–7). The most common understanding of it today usually references not the commercial book club, which had its heyday in the twentieth century (e.g., the Book-of-the-Month Club or the Literary Guild), but rather a recurring book discussion group, an informal meetup of readers.4 Publishers have capitalized on the popularity of such sociable reading communities, providing discussion questions and prompts for book club meetings in paperback editions of books and on publisher websites.5 Similarly, public libraries cater to book clubs, lending out book club copies in portable sets in a box or bucket for easy transport. In the mid-1990s, Oprah Winfrey took the book club format to national television, exciting book industry executives with the possibility of an Oprah recommendation as an unprecedented sales boost; however, critics also questioned Oprah’s qualifications as a tastemaker.6
More recently, celebrities from various niches of the culture industry have started book clubs, including Jenna Bush Hager from the Today TV show (Read with Jenna), Kim Kardashian-West, Emma Watson (Our Shared Shelf), and Emma Roberts (Belletrist)—and of course Reese Witherspoon.7 Celebrity recommendation culture reproduces the logics of the high-powered twenty-first-century publishing environment in which “big fiction” (Sinykin) reigns supreme. Today of course, celebrities do not need a TV platform like Oprah’s or Jenna Bush Hager’s to reach their audiences. Since the advent of social media, engagement with fans has moved to online spaces that feel more unmediated and direct. Similarly, book club–related activities have migrated to digital platforms, from GoodReads to BookTok. Celebrity tastemakers have jumped on the bandwagon, using online book club(-esque) formats to engage with their fans and elevate their brands (see Fuller and Rehberg Sedo). Celebrities and their respective teams add an additional layer of curation within an oversaturated marketplace for a wider readership. The complex gatekeeping mechanisms in the contemporary marketplace still lead to lopsidedness and a measurable lack of diversity (Koegler and Norrick-Rühl 75). As we see in the quantitative roundup below, RBC subverts classic curational paradigms with its exclusive female gendering and an increasing focus on diverse voices and diversity issues in the works chosen.
While industry insiders have published blog posts and YouTube videos on RBC, and Publishers Weekly (PW) regularly documents “Reese’s Reach,” there is no scholarly examination of the club to date.8 What we offer here is a convergence of methods and perspectives, coming from an interdisciplinary collaboration between literary studies and book studies but also questioning how to approach novelistic forms in the increasingly networked twenty-first-century marketplace. For our study, we paired book trade sourcework (especially articles from PW) with bibliographic data drawn from the Library of Congress catalog and publishers’ websites. We also cast a wide net for popular media sources to undergird the PW sources. With support from our research assistant Nayantara Srinivasan and taking direction from Richard Jean So’s publishing schematics in his study Redlining Culture, we compiled a spreadsheet of all of RBC picks, adding a wealth of additional and adjacent information (see Norrick-Rühl et al.). This spreadsheet allows for some basic quantitative assessments regarding the representation of specific genres, identities, and publishing firms on the RBC list. As a final methodological inroad, we chose to “read like book club members” and thereby covered more than fifty novels and nonfiction books across a spread of genres. This hermeneutic approach best affords a type of meso-level inquiry that strategically yields to the institutional agency of a commercial venture like RBC while retaining a footing in the study of narrative and in literary criticism.
This essay provides an integrated reading of RBC through its various self-descriptions and media channels as well as through its aggregated selection list and a sample of the novels that became monthly picks. Coordinating various social framings with the fine-grained mechanics of individual literary texts, we assert that RBC across its selections and online paratexts establishes a book club metanarrative: a potent account of its own aesthetic and social ambitions evolving in serial form in and between its selections. Through specific topical and generic clusters that we identified among its monthly selections, RBC also elevates what we call a “publishing imaginary” in which the media ecology, hierarchies of taste, and genre conventions of contemporary literature are reflexively entangled with the praxeological dimensions of reading book club fiction. In this scenario, the book club’s overarching focus on diversity and female empowerment dovetails with increasingly routinized patterns of celebrity book culture, always already embedded in commodification yet quietly subversive of male- and white-coded registers of literariness. Amid the turmoil of the first Trump presidency, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement, RBC’s female-centered metanarrative has offered club members a sense of competency, belonging, and proximity that draws out into the open the actors of the culture industry while strategically negating any strict hierarchies between them. RBC resolves the tension between culture and commerce inherent in sales-boosting literary formats by combining appeals to parasocial (reading) joy and love with an overarching sense of feminist economic agency. In the following, we first ground our account of the RBC metanarrative in a mini-history of the club’s evolution before discussing preliminary results of a quantitative assessment of the first one hundred RBC selections between 2017 and 2024. In the final part of the essay, we put pressure on the idea of the book club metanarrative via critical readings of novels ranging from Kuang’s Yellowface to Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts and Tia Williams’s Seven Days in June. Through their explicit attention to contemporary modes of reading and writing, these novels contribute key discursive elements to the RBC publishing imaginary, yet they also expose the peculiar burdens and constraints faced by authors of color in the marketplace.
The History and Media Ecology of RBC from Hashtag to Literary Institution
PW locates Reese Witherspoon’s entry into the publishing world in 2013, when she gave a short recommendation of J. Courtney Sullivan’s The Engagements (Penguin Random House) on her personal Instagram channel (Boog). Simultaneously, Witherspoon’s production company optioned the book to be adapted into a film version. Witherspoon’s recommendations (posted irregularly under the hashtag #RWbookclub) were followed closely by the German reader Shannon Theumer, who in 2014 set up a Facebook group and later an Instagram channel for like-minded readers using the handle @rwbookclub. When the membership and follower numbers had climbed steadily to 100,000 and beyond, Witherspoon’s team contacted Theumer and made an offer to take over the handle, after which the book club was professionalized and named Sunshine Book Club. The first official pick of Sunshine Book Club, in June 2017, was Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, the debut novel of the Scottish author Gail Honeyman (US edition: Penguin Random House). This novel was optioned for adaptation by Witherspoon’s production company, with media reporting that Witherspoon might star in the title role of Eleanor Oliphant, but the movie currently seems stuck in development, as is also true of the adaptation of Sullivan’s The Engagements. Production status notwithstanding, this clearly shows that Witherspoon and her associates sought to build a book-to-screen pipeline even before professionalizing and institutionalizing the book club.
After its official founding, Sunshine Book Club regularly announced selections of adult trade fiction and (to a lesser extent) nonfiction, with occasional young adult fiction selections as well. PW and other media outlets were quick to identify a sales effect. For instance, according to PW, the success of Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing (published in book form in August 2018 and selected for RBC in September 2018) can be traced to its status as an RBC pick (Juris, “Of She Reese Sings”). To date, the book has sold upward of eighteen million copies worldwide, notwithstanding ongoing allegations of racism and criminal activity in the author’s past. The Reese effect was even more obvious and measurable with a different title that year, One Day in December, by the British author Josie Silver, whose book was published in October 2018 and sold about one thousand to two thousand units a week until selected by Witherspoon in December 2018, after which weekly sales skyrocketed to almost sixteen thousand copies (Juris, “Reese’s Reach”).
Not all RBC picks have been optioned or adapted, though many have. High-profile examples include Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng (published as a book and selected for RBC in 2017; released direct-to-streaming in 2020), which was adapted as an eight-part series, produced by and starring Witherspoon. This is noteworthy for Witherspoon’s casting of herself as the white suburban protagonist who is confronted with her own racism and bias throughout the course of the narrative. Where the Crawdads Sing, too, was adapted and coproduced by Witherspoon (release 2022).
All books, whether optioned for streaming, adapted for the cinema or not, share the Hello Sunshine principle of focusing on (often middle-aged) women’s experiences; additionally, all of the books were written by women. These criteria differ from the pattern that Oprah Winfrey established in her TV-based recommendation format. With her focus on the transformative power of reading, Oprah Winfrey paved the way for today’s celebrity book clubs. In the 1990s, Winfrey was criticized for her lack of literary background, and the Franzen-Winfrey spat over (female) attention and prestige has gone down in literary history. Winfrey stressed emotional reading journeys centered on pain and suffering as the core aim of her book club (R. Mark Hall has called this the “Oprahfication” of literacy). In his study Reading as Therapy, Timothy Aubry holds that “a central function of the novel has been, for at least two centuries, to help middle-class readers narrate and manage their private problems,” identifying book clubs—especially Oprah’s Book Club—as a central institutional location of therapeutic reading (26; see also Travis). The metanarrative of Oprah’s Book Club, as studied by sociologist Eva Illouz, revolves around pain and the readers’ visceral interaction with it.9 Even though the RBC metanarrative has many affinities with Oprah’s, it shows a much more pronounced interest in empowerment through bookish consumption as opposed to therapy. As Elle Hunt pinpoints in The Guardian, today’s “book club boom reflects the modern-day acceptance of what might once have been derided as ‘selling out’” by other agents in the literary marketplace.10 RBC’s metanarrative challenges book club readers to act more consciously as participants and stakeholders of the culture industry.
In August 2021, in a highly publicized venture, Witherspoon’s production company was sold for a reported $900 million to the investment firm Blackstone Group (Hirsch), with Witherspoon and her production company’s CEO, Sarah Harden, holding equity and sitting on the board of the new company established under Blackstone’s umbrella. RBC was part of the deal and highlighted in the press release as “one of Hello Sunshine’s shining stars and most distinctive offerings” (“Hello Sunshine”). In the New York Times, Sarah Harden emphasized the future perspectives for the company in a clear nod to what Jessica Pressman terms “bookishness”: future products, events, and engagement would be “targeted to a female consumer” and “centered around the lifestyle of books and reading” (Harden; qtd. in Hirsch). Mere weeks later, the interior design company Havenly announced a long-term partnership with RBC and in April launched the first “Reading Room” home decor line, including rugs, bookcases, and throw blankets. Havenly itself builds on the narrative of bookishness: “The story of your Reading Room starts with you and your inner biblio-style—from boho chic to modern luxe and more” (Clark). Havenly thereby frames book reading and home decoration as types of self-care for high-powered, affluent women.
Again targeting women readers as upper-middle-class consumers, RBC began a partnership with Norwegian Cruise Lines in 2022: RBC at Sea. In conjunction, the Hello Sunshine YouTube channel published two ad-heavy videos, one with the Instagrammer and TV personality Ali Manno (January 30, 2023) and the other with the RBC author Tembi Locke (February 9, 2023). The year 2023 saw the continuation of these types of partnerships with a large-scale, international initiative between RBC and Sheraton Hotels and Resorts. Selected Sheraton hotel lobbies in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States have been equipped with RBC lobby libraries, and in the continental United States, Sheraton hotels now host moderated book club meetups within Gatherings, their signature lobby event series: “we’ve teamed up with Reese’s Book Club to . . . connect through a literary bond and joy for the written word” (“Together”). The brands reinforce and amplify each other here, with Sheraton’s spaces offering increased offline visibility to RBC, whereas RBC and the lobby libraries evoke a sense of bookishness and elevate the Sheraton Hotels and Resorts lobbies to the status of a literary event venue. In PW, John Maher emphasizes that the Sheraton pop-ups “provide a unique opportunity” for RBC, “which does not own a bricks-and-mortar bookstore, to get [selected] authors in-person exposure.” The Sheraton lobbies double as bookstores; patrons can purchase the books in the lobby. RBC has also experimented with a pop-up bookshop during the holidays at a mall in Los Angeles, but this is the only example of entering into physical retail spaces (Chikhoune). In another, smaller-scale, brand partnership, RBC has collaborated with the California-based winery SIMI, led by female winemakers, to sell signature wine packages under the headline “The Editor’s Collection”; the collaboration seems to have been discontinued. Other partners highlighted on the website and Instagram include Bailey’s, Lavazza, and Taco Bell.
As all these initiatives clearly expose, RBC is a commercial venture within a corporate superstructure (Hello Sunshine, the Blackstone Group). For outsiders, the business model is not transparent. The income does not stem directly from book sales to members; there are no membership fees; there is no subscription service. Further, RBC describes its operations as charitable: “All proceeds from books you purchase in our app, items you buy from our shop, and initiatives we do with our partners go to The Readership—our pay-it-forward program diving deeper to advance literacy.” The Readership is only described vaguely on the RBC website, where it is presented as a corporate social responsibility initiative committed to promoting literacy through support of diverse voices, independent bookstores, and equitable access to books. The website links to an RBC online shop hosted by Bookshop.org, a platform whose sales support independent bookstores. Scattered traces of small-scale donations to schools can be found online, but the biggest initiative currently funded by The Readership appears to be the LitUp Fellowship for aspiring diverse writers. In collaboration with the nonprofit organization We Need Diverse Books, the RBC LitUp Fellowship holders receive an entry ticket to a week-long writing seminar and are assigned an RBC author as mentor. In addition, they are promised advice from RBC staff. In a first tangible outcome of the project, Bloomsbury YA published the debut novel Time and Time Again, by Chatham Greenfield, in July 2024, with paratexts that mark it as LitUp output.
Tracing these networks and recommendation trails can be a very rewarding exercise, as it showcases the media-ecological paths and monetized retail strategies—some of them carefully engineered, some of them serendipitous or accidental—that individual book club readers may enter. Thus, integrating the activity of readers into the digital networks of the book club, RBC curates a community of self-aware, emancipated readers of books by women in which the hierarchies between themselves and the professional publishers, agents, and authors at least symbolically disappear. We now take a bird’s-eye view of the selection mechanisms and the curatorial patterns based on a custom-designed dataset.
Counting the Club
As opposed to some of the sprawling data available on the globalized and US book market, RBC monthly selections provide us with a very neat set of data. As of September 2024, the club announced a total of one hundred selections, including YA selections, all of which we tabulated and statistically analyzed. Beyond the confirmation that one hundred percent of RBC selections are authored by women, our data indicate that (1) concerning the diversity of the selected authors, RBC selections display higher levels than the US book industry mean; (2) while the club affords ample space for genres such as romance, mystery, thrillers, and suspense, it still centers “literary fiction”; and (3) RBC selections almost exclusively elevate highly marketable books from the Big Five publishers.
In our data, we cover the period from June 2017 to September 2024, tracking all picks. RBC selected one hundred books during this time, of which eighty-eight are adult nonfiction or fiction titles and twelve are YA picks.11 Given the focus of RBC on diversity with the LitUp Fellowship, we took a closer look at the demographic breakdown of the authors of RBC selections. Twenty-four (27.3%) books are by international authors (i.e., those whose nationality is not the United States) and are not categorized according to So’s breakdown; sixty-four are by US authors. The international authors include an overwhelming majority from the United Kingdom, though work by two African and three Southeast Asian authors was selected. The demographic breakdown of the sixty-four books by US authors is shown in Table 1.
Demographic Breakdown of Books by US Authors
These numbers are preliminary and subject to several contingencies.12 Held against US census data, the racial breakdown of RBC writers appears to substantively underrepresent Latinx authors while slightly overrepresenting Black, Asian American, and presumably also white authors.13 Witherspoon may be characterized in the media as someone who is “fluent . . . in the language of modern social justice” (Daum), but so far, this does not fully reflect in the RBC picks. The language around the LitUp Fellowship for previously unagented and unpublished writers (women or nonbinary) from diverse backgrounds shows that RBC aims to raise awareness of diverse books. And, in fact, if compared against the total book output in the United States, the RBC number of 34.4% of titles by nonwhite authors towers far above the industry-wide number of eleven percent computed by Richard Jean So for the year 2018 (So and Wezerek).
The spreadsheet also records the genre (fiction/nonfiction) and subgenre as indicated in each book’s Kirkus review.14 RBC overwhelmingly prefers fiction, with only eleven nonfiction picks (12.5%) (Figures 1 and 2). The preference for fiction has increased over time, with RBC only selecting two nonfiction titles since 2021 (although one of them was the much-hyped one-hundredth pick The Comfort of Crows, by Margaret Renkl, who was Witherspoon’s high school English teacher).15 The fiction selections are almost all long-form prose novels; only two of the seventy-seven fiction selections are collections of short stories. Generally, there is a healthy mix of subgenres.
Distribution of adult fiction subgenres in Reese’s Book Club titles (2017–2024), based on listings from the Kirkus Reviews website (N = 77). The numbers above the bars are the total title count.
Distribution of adult nonfiction subgenres in Reese’s Book Club titles (2017–2024), based on listings from the Kirkus Reviews website (N = 11). The numbers above the bars are the total title count.
As shown in Figure 1, anglophone literary fiction dominates RBC, with thirty-six percent (there are no translations among the selections). Other subgenres include historical, general, mystery, suspense and thriller, and one fantasy pick. While many of the novels feature romantic subplots, the romance subgenre is only listed seven times (nine percent). This is surprisingly low given the recent romance boom. In a recent Esquire article, journalist Sophia Vershbow notes that the RBC selections seem to match genre with time of year, picking “lighter, easier” titles in May and December as a form of acknowledgment that these are especially busy months for women with care responsibilities. The spread of subgenres throughout the year merits further study.
We also looked at the timeline of selections in relation to time of publication. Working from the definitions of “frontlist” and “backlist” according to which a title shifts from the former to the latter after twelve months, only nine percent of RBC picks are backlist picks. Increasingly, RBC picks coincide with publication, indicating that the club is involved from an early stage when publishers are planning the publication of the novel. Further research would be necessary to find out whether publishers are aligning publication dates to coincide with RBC announcements—or vice versa.
Some of the most one-sided figures in our dataset pertain to the publishing houses from which the selections are gleaned. While the independent publishing scene was depicted in whimsical fashion in Your Place or Mine, a 2023 straight-to-streaming romantic comedy starring Witherspoon and coproduced by Hello Sunshine, actual independent publishers play a very minor role in the RBC selection list. Almost all of the chosen titles are books published by the Big Five publishers. From June 2017 to September 2024, only five titles (5.7%) are not Big Five outputs. The independent publishers selected are Bloomsbury (twice), Spiegel and Grau (a former PRH imprint revived as an independent publisher), and Catapult and Counterpoint Press (both belong to Catapult Book Group, a New York–based merger of three independent presses, distributed by PRH).
The breakdown of the Big Five is as follows: thirty-six books (40.9%) are Penguin Random House across a wide range of imprints. Preferred imprints are Pamela Dorman, Ballantine, and Putnam. Twenty books (22.7%) are HarperCollins titles, ten of which (11.4%) are on the imprint Morrow’s list. Twelve (13.6%) are Macmillan, of which five (5.7%) are with the imprint Flatiron. Ten (11.4%) are Simon and Schuster books, and a mere five (5.7%) are Hachette. Promoting bibliodiversity, then, is a challenge that RBC has not quite risen to, especially regarding the integration of publishing output beyond the Big Five. Then again, it may be a conscious strategy to focus almost exclusively on potential supersellers. By screening information from the Publishers Marketplace website, Kasia Manolas finds that RBC picks are increasingly so-called pre-empt titles, meaning that publishers have paid extra to take the books off the table before they go to auction.16 This emphasizes the RBC focus on books that are expected to sell extraordinarily well even before the RBC selection is announced. As such, the monthly experience for readers of the club will correspond nicely with the RBC metanarrative of female empowerment. When it selects titles slated for publication with the Big Five, and even more so with pre-empt books, RBC may still credibly claim that it “lifts up” and “advances” the careers of women writers—yet it mostly turns bestsellers into even bigger bestsellers. If they are so inclined, readers can reliably track and celebrate the guaranteed material success of each month’s author through the RBC Instagram feed. What may feel like direct empowerment is built on a set of corporate decisions and selection mechanisms happening farther upstream from the book club.
There is ample room for further quantitative research into the RBC universe. At this stage, we intend to set these initial findings alongside other patterns of a more aesthetic and narrative nature (after all, we are dealing with a book club, not a Sam’s Club). Having read more than one-half of all RBC picks, we can assert that the prestructured form of book club reading results in an altered perspective on individual works. Read inside the framework of RBC, these books collectively contribute to what we call the “book club metanarrative.” The following section explores this metanarrative in some of its more easily recognizable forms. Fitting the paratextual discourse of diversity and representation, the close readings center directly on the work of three authors of color while referencing other similar texts in more condensed form.
Reading Reese’s Recommendations I: Devoutly Literary Novels
In his study Bring on the Books for Everybody, Collins provocatively argues that larger chunks of “high literature” in the present operate exactly like “genre fiction” regarding the way they are marketed and the generic conventions they follow. Against the backdrop of our multimedia present, Collins asserts the emergence of a genre he calls “Lit-lit”—a pun on “chick-lit” with a focus on literature-with-a-capital-L—in which “the act of reading becomes an all-sustaining pleasure that is available only between the covers of a book” (223). With “devoutly literary” books such as Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004) as his paradigmatic tutor texts, Collins highlights that this peculiar genre constitutes a methodological challenge because it falls between the cracks of either traditional aesthetics or traditional cultural studies (226). To address the marketability of aesthetic experiences, Collins claims, we need to combine both hermeneutics and social critique.
Building on Collins’s work, Murray has recently sketched a program of “literary cultural studies” that fuses hermeneutics and sociology. “Text and context would be held in dynamic relationship,” Murray writes, “posited as mutually constitutive, without superimposing the epistemological claims of one discipline on the other” (“Varieties” par. 19). To unite text and context—or in our case, the individual novel with the social formation of the book club—we are in need of “mid-level concepts” that provide a glimpse at the mediating “meso-level” of literary communication (par. 6).17 Taking these cues by Collins and Murray, we see the idea of the book club metanarrative as a promising mid-level concept to elucidate institutional mediation in the literary marketplace. As the following shows, reading serially in a book club space may increase the likelihood that readers become aware of relational narrative resonances between individual titles. Paired with more explicit paratexts in the official RBC promotional materials, patterns emerge within and among the dozens of novels selected so far. We here highlight two of these patterns that contribute to the RBC metanarrative: first, a new blend of devoutly literary novels that highlight the precarious but sublime nature of reading against the social upheavals of the Trump Era; second, industry-insider narratives that explicitly engage with the constraints of the contemporary publishing landscape to create a distinct sense between author and reader of belonging to the same in-group.
Let us turn to the devoutly literary bestseller Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng. On a contextual level, the RBC selection of this book in October 2022 comes as no surprise to avid Reese followers: Ng’s earlier novel Little Fires Everywhere stands as the paradigmatic example of the club’s immense multimedia possibilities for adaptation and cross-promotion (see above). As of early 2024, no tangible adaptation plans for Our Missing Hearts appear to have materialized.18 Ng centers her dystopian novel on twelve-year-old Noah Gardner, nicknamed “Bird,” whose mother has abandoned the family as a political fugitive from an authoritarian government that has been elected into power in the United States of the near future. After a sustained economic collapse that upended the livelihoods of many if not most Americans, a new phase of relative social calm has set in, founded on law-and-order policies and a distinct set of anti-Asian measures grouped under PACT (the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act). Following in the genre footsteps of Ray Bradbury’s and Margaret Atwood’s dystopias, the novel depicts certain reading materials as contraband in these authoritarian United States.
As the child of a white linguist and a half-Asian poet residing in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Bird feels the burden of censorship and suppression in bookish places like the library. With Bird as focalizer, the reader follows the perspective of an inquisitive preteen who has been kept away from literary spaces so as not to endanger him. At the beginning of his quest to find his mother, he steps into the public library near his home for the first time in his life. From Ng’s description, it is clear that this is a thinly fictionalized version of the Cambridge Public Library on Broadway, a couple of blocks from Harvard Yard.19 Bird feels dizzy from the sight of all the books; the words spoken by his linguist-father Ethan echo in his mind:
From liber, his father has told him. Books. Which comes from the word meaning the inner bark of trees, which comes from the word for to strip, to peel. Early peoples pulled off the thin strips for writing material, of course. . . . But I like to think of it as peeling back layers. Revealing layers of meaning.
(49)
Where Ethan professionally pursues the historicity of words, Bird’s mother, Margaret, gravitates toward the creative potentials of language: “For her the magic was not what words had been, but what they were capable of: their ability to sketch, with one sweeping brushstroke, the contours of an experience, the form of a feeling” (176).20 As the child of these two, Bird represents not only a multicultural United States but also a unified vision of literacy that combines historicity and creativity—and this subtext carries across the diegetic line into the reader’s sphere, where the physical book Our Missing Hearts is supposed to be imbued with just such an ethos. Collins’s description of the devoutly literary as a market-driven genre applies here—especially in the closing segment of her novel, where a literary recital dramatically changes the course of events. Ng indeed follows the Lit-lit framework of Ian McEwan’s Saturday.
And yet, Ng’s aestheticizing appraisal of reading and writing does not merely address the perceived shortcomings of nonprinted media; it plays out against the fascist tendencies apparent in US public discourse since Donald Trump entered the political arena. The history of conservative attempts to ban or remove books from libraries is already quite extensive. However, in shape and scale, recent years have seen an explosion of book bans on the local and state level. Ng’s peculiar interest in libraries and librarians thus is not merely “devoutly” literary—it deploys a vision of literary culture where reading equals resistance. The preference for print over digital in Our Missing Hearts has less to do with aesthetic considerations of good reading than with clandestine communications infrastructure built to escape the all-seeing state. In her underground quest to keep track of forcibly adopted Asian American children, Margaret leans on a message relay system devised by radical librarians: “All over the country, zigging and zagging, she traced the flow of information. Emails could be hacked, calls intercepted. But libraries shared books all the time; pooling information was part of their work” (235). Ng’s vision of malign digital media dovetails with other twenty-first-century Lit-lit dystopias, such as Dave Eggers’s widely read The Circle (2013). Nonetheless, the allegorical relationship between reading-as-resistance and reading within the RBC universe is tenuous at best. Books within Our Missing Hearts appear as precarious and fragile; Margaret’s book of poems that gives the novel its name finally appears only as a shadow of fragments spread across readers’ memories, waiting for Bird to go on an archival quest to reassemble his mother’s revolutionary heritage. This vision of precarious, radical literature hardly squares with the RBC model of affordable paperback bestsellers embedded in a sea of bookish commodities and stylish designer wares.
Reading Reese’s Recommendations II: Industry-Insider Novels
While the devoutly literary novel already bears a considerable amount of reflexivity regarding literary form and narrative, a second species of books turns up the degree of reflexive engagement further. A set of what we call “industry-insider novels” imbues the RBC metanarrative with a complex and intricate view of the contemporary publishing scene. We already considered the noticeable confluence of the intradiegetic publishing apparatus in Kuang’s Yellowface with the institutionalized adaptation machine of RBC. In June Hayward (a.k.a. Juniper Song), Kuang confronts readers with a narrator-focalizer whose industry acumen bleeds from every page. June shared an academic and writerly trajectory with her Chinese American friend Athena Liu, with stints in creative writing departments at Yale and Georgetown. Kuang likewise studied at these universities; she is currently completing a PhD in East Asian languages and literatures at Yale. Where June only finds modest success with her debut novel, Athena’s first book tops the bestseller lists, receives critical acclaim, and racks up award nominations in the domains of both speculative and literary fiction (e.g., Booker, Nebula, Hugo). One could keep chronicling the parallels between the author Kuang and her character Athena Liu. In this regard, Yellowface takes the writing program mantra “write what you know” and applies it to the author’s experience of the publishing industry.
Athena Liu’s initial appearance on the first page of the novel is a nutshell representation of the literary scene in what Mark McGurl dubs “the program era.” Mentioning Athena’s residencies, awards, book deals with a Big Five publisher, and MFA credentials from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the book’s opening checks all the boxes of program-era publishing success. With a brand-new Netflix deal and a huge following on Instagram, Athena manages to further monetize her literary excellence in the world of new media. Just as her fictional novel Voice and Echo “perfectly straddled the line between speculative and commercial fiction” (Kuang 5), Yellowface engages in genre-blending as it fuses a darkly satirical portrait of the publishing industry with a thriller plot containing some supernatural undertones. The main objective of the novel is to expose the often-invisible racial dynamics of the publishing industry and skewer the commodification of identity through the con game played by June Hayward. After the tragic death of Athena, June steals a finished draft of her ambitious novel The Last Front and transforms herself into the Asian-coded author Juniper Song to cash in on the public demand for multicultural literature.
In this setup, Kuang is not the first author of color to turn the dynamics of publishing into the raw material for a satirical novel. One of the paradigmatic examples in this mini-genre comes from Percival Everett, who has published more than twenty idiosyncratic novels. Early in his career, Everett became frustrated with the way his work was pigeonholed as African American fiction, even though to his estimation it had little to do with race. From this frustration sprang his most widely discussed book, Erasure (2001), recently adapted into an Oscar-nominated film (2023) in which the protagonist and authorial avatar writes an offensive parody of gritty Black ghetto literature to enormous commercial success. As Sinykin points out, such a peculiar metaperspective on publishing found little interest with major publishers and was picked up only by literary nonprofit presses, such as Graywolf and the now-defunct University Press of New England. As is visible in the case of Yellowface, however, this has changed: “In the twenty-first century, multicultural satire became a marketable conglomerate mode, managed with aplomb by Paul Beatty, Mat Johnson, Colson Whitehead, and many others” (Sinykin 164). Notably, Erasure, as well as paratextual interviews by Percival Everett, single out Oprah and other celebrity book club leaders as among the main culprits for the toxic commodification of race (Sinykin 156).21
R. F. Kuang gestures beyond Everett’s satirical take-down in the denouement of her book, as June Hayward and her publishing nemesis, the editor Candice Lee, battle over publishing the real story behind Athena Liu’s postmortem fate. Tell-all stories, memoirs, and autofictional accounts devoted to the injustices of US publishing, we are explicitly told at the end of Yellowface, are good for business and keep the digital attention economy buzzing. The film adaptation of Erasure, the 2023 American Fiction, directed by Cord Jefferson, likewise adds another layer around Everett’s plot, indicating that the protagonist decides to cash in on his publishing experience by writing the script for the very movie in which he is starring. Metafictional play aside, this new market-friendly appeal of industry-insider fiction provides a case of having one’s cake and eating it, too—criticizing pigeon-holing and commodification within a highly commodifiable product. RBC cannot resolve this tangle of aesthetic, commercial, and social issues. Yet through its monthly selections, it provides a metanarrative that allows the avid reader to enter an observant and cognizant positionality vis-à-vis publishing. As Eben Muse shows in Fantasies of the Bookstore (2022), recent years have seen strong commercial interest in a subgenre of bookish fiction whose plots accord central significance to libraries and librarians, bookstores and booksellers, publishing houses and editors, and other literary figures and institutions. RBC takes the progressive reform mantra of “raising awareness” and turns it inward by exposing the power structures within the contemporary publishing industry. Via this distinct publishing imaginary, the book club metanarrative short-circuits the literary communication model and draws reader and authors—along with publishers, book clubs, and other literary institutions—into the same sphere where they all act as self-aware, emancipated subjects in pursuit of cultural uplift. Yellowface is the most glaring and drastic example of this strategy on the RBC selection list. Yet Reese’s most notable contribution to industry-insider literature does not unfold in the sphere of satire, thriller, or speculative fiction. It stems from the genre of romance.
In the character constellations of RBC romances, there is a noticeable tendency toward writerly figures, such as the sketch writer Sally Milz in Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy (the April 2023 pick) or the literary agent Emma in Cesca Major’s Maybe Next Time (the November 2023 pick). Both Sittenfeld’s and Major’s novels have already been singled out by Reese Witherspoon’s production company Hello Sunshine and are slated to be adapted. In Maybe Next Time, the protagonist Emma needs to weather a publishing scandal involving a star author publicly bemoaning cancel culture; in a Groundhog-Day-type scenario, Emma does not “get it right” until she quits her job in protest against the conservative online ramblings of an aging white male writer her agency represents (Major 38). Our own pick for the most explicitly metapublishing romance, however, is Tia Williams’s Seven Days in June, selected by RBC in June 2021. In this New York Times bestseller—whose genre attributes barred it from being reviewed by the New York Times—the Black writer Eva Mercy (née Genevieve Mercier) has hit publishing gold with the fantasy-erotica series Cursed, a blend of Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey, but struggles with her own love life: “Eva had never set out for her name to be synonymous with witches, vampires, and orgasms. As a double major in creative writing and advanced melancholia, Eva had accidentally stumbled upon this life” (Williams 6). A college roommate had submitted one of Eva’s stories for a creative writing competition: “She got first prize and a literary agent. Three months later, Eva was a college dropout with a six-figure multiple-book deal. Ironic that she made a living writing about sexy sex. Eva couldn’t remember the last time she got naked with anyone, undead or otherwise” (6). Eva’s rise from college dorm to romance stardom neatly represents the RBC publishing imaginary. Yet her career trajectory does not match the working conditions romance writers encounter in the publishing industry. Romance writers, as Brouillette holds, are usually poorly paid and struggle at the forefront of a precarious digital gig economy (“Romance Work”). At the novel’s outset, Eva finds herself amid her die-hard fans—to the writer’s chagrin, mostly “white women of a certain age” (10)—at a meet-and-greet during which she announces the recent optioning of the film rights for Cursed.
The novel’s romance plot pairs the unintentionally low-brow writer Eva with the reclusive literary genius Shane Hall, a problematic fling from her past who sits firmly at the autonomous margin of the US literary field. Given this pairing, Seven Days in June functions as an easily decodable allegory of literary prestige in which romance and “literary fiction” clash and ultimately interweave. Tia Williams characterizes Shane’s oeuvre in the following words:
His characters were whimsical, vivid, practically mythologized humans. And through ecstatic attention to detail, emotion, and nuance, he artfully manipulated readers into becoming so invested in his characters’ every thought that fifty pages would go by before they realized that there was no plot. None. Just a girl named Eight, who lost her keys.
(55)
All character, no plot: a disarmingly simple description of Lit-lit.
Despite the novel’s apparent genre affiliations, Tia Williams also employs the type of ironic multiculturalism that Sinykin has detected in contemporary literary works. Seven Days in June heaps ample criticism on well-meaning but ineffective social justice work, personified, for example, by Eva’s daughter, whose full name Audre Zora Toni Mercy-Moore bears an over-the-top amount of historical and literary weight. Williams also ridicules the conversations on race in contemporary publishing, as when a scholarly commentator tries to dominate a panel of Black writers at a convention with his take that African American literature is only worthwhile if it directly aims to “DISMANTLE WHITE SUPREMACIST HOOLIGANERY” (53).22 On the panel, Eva takes offense when her fantasy romances are dismissed as fluff. Making a surprise appearance in the audience, Shane Hall interrupts the panel discussion and, in a bid to reunite with his love from days past, throws his considerable cultural capital behind Eva to elevate her work. En route, Shane refutes the “political correctness” he feels from “liberal white people” (64) and upholds the position that writers should transcend identity categories: “You’re not a man and it doesn’t matter,” he tells Eva regarding the male protagonist of Cursed, because you write with sharpened senses and notice the unnoticed, and your creative intuition’s so powerful you can rock any narrative to sleep. You see. And you write. With Eight I do the same thing. . . . I’m just not as good as you” (62). When the panel receives a prompt from a white journalist to describe and explain “the explicit racism you face as Black authors” (64), Shane has a genuine, nonironic answer: “The burden isn’t on me to explain it. . . . The burden’s on y’all to fix it. Good luck” (64).23 Here Williams’s novel appears closest to explicitly pronouncing its political stake: Black literature needs to be freed from the burden of explaining race to white Americans.24 Instead, it needs to embrace, co-opt, and perhaps remodel the commercial institutions of literature, art, and popular culture to open up avenues for diverse storytelling—including the guilty pleasure of Black vampire erotica.25
Shane’s public endorsement of Eva’s “fluff” immediately spirals from the conference room into the online public, triggering a lightning-fast transfer of cultural capital:
She was suddenly on the radar of a whole new demo of the book-buying population. Literary types. And they would tweet and Snap and Instagram about her, and buzz would grow, and (fingers crossed) she’d ascend from popular niche author to a major voice in the book world. A thought leader! Someone whose interspecies sex movie you’d pay to see!
(66)
Seven Days in June here provides a pop version of Bourdieu’s literary field theory, with its generative modeling of the complex entanglements of economic and symbolic capital in the domains of art and cultural production. Fitting to this Bourdieusian outlook, the narrative arc of the whole novel indeed unfolds the troubles of two Black authors navigating between the autonomous and heteronomous poles of literary production. Williams stresses that the success of Eva’s Cursed series and Shane’s cycle of novels centered on a troubled girl named Eight derives from an authentic, unfulfilled, youthful love channeled into romantic allegories written for a readership of one.26
If this kind of authentic expression is ultimately unsustainable under the pressure of deals and markets, where does the successful but unfulfilled author turn to recoup a sense of autonomy? Shane attempts to rekindle his creative instincts by renting an apartment in a West Village townhouse once occupied by James Baldwin. Even though we learn little about his future writing career, the decision to latch onto Baldwin is notable, also within the aesthetic purview of Williams’s novel. Eva’s trajectory appears in more detailed fashion. At the novel’s end, she receives another award for the Cursed series and shocks the crowd by announcing a premature end to her narrative mega-series. Instead, she has found her calling by reconnecting to her female ancestry from a town called Belle Fleur in Louisiana, which she has never visited. “I come from a long line of weirdos, outsiders, and misfits,” she tells the audience. “I’m a misfit. And my purpose is to give us all a voice. I’m going to write their story, which is mine, too” (305). Before the inevitable grand reconciliation with Shane and a picture-perfect happy ending, Eva embarks on a research trip to Louisiana, tracing family connections, visiting archives, and interviewing local townspeople. The book that Eva hopes to write based on all this research represents the literary ideal of the RBC publishing imaginary: an authentic, wholly autonomous creation reassembling a personal history and urgent feminist account of the historicity of race in the United States. This parallels Bird’s attempt at the end of Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts to gather the textual traces of his mother and to “set her back down on paper again” (325). Similar reflexive plot resolutions involving ambitious book projects also occur in other bestselling contemporary novels.27 All told, then, reflexivity within the RBC publishing imaginary addresses potentials for writerly autonomy and promises—even if it does not directly deliver—an idealized vision of literary labor under mass market capitalism.
Conclusion
Given the variety found in the growing archive of RBC picks, this essay could have pursued multiple different trajectories. The limited path we chose through this body of works and paratexts still showcases several benefits of closely engaging with the self-descriptions of RBC, its literary picks, and the digital media ecology that Witherspoon has created (and curated) around the selections. In a recent review essay, Brouillette theorizes the influence of the kind of industry reflexivity we saw in the preceding section on authorship in the present. Identifying a common theme in classical literary-sociological work by Pierre Bourdieu and more recent inquiries by Gisèle Sapiro and Dan Sinykin, Brouillette argues: “Fictional reflexivity is in essence one key means that authors have, here, of negotiating autonomy within the field. . . . One establishes authority through display of the capacity to grasp perfectly all the workings of the field, including one’s own positioning” (“Author” 100). In closing, we take inspiration from Brouillette to ask: What does it mean for contemporary readers in general, and RBC readers in particular, to “grasp perfectly all the workings of the field”?
For one, the first one hundred RBC selections show a happy coexistence between a reflexive publishing imaginary and other forms that contribute to the book club metanarrative. Chief among these we see female-centered family novels that chronicle the lives, loves, and hardships of women across generations. Here the overlay between fiction and the private lives of readers creates ample potential for reading as bibliotherapy. RBC includes a few self-help books among its selections, which make this reparative, therapeutic mode explicit. But the more refined literary version of therapeutic writing can be seen in the two selections by Ann Patchett, one of only three authors to appear twice on the RBC list so far. Patchett’s This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (the November 2017 pick) contains a set of essays centered on the “moments that have shaped her as a daughter, wife, and writer,” as the cover blurb indicates. In the August 2023 pick, Tom Lake, Patchett has the protagonist Lara relate her life story to her three daughters, who flee city life during the first Covid lockdowns and hunker down on the family’s farm in Michigan.
In these reparative tales of trauma and bliss, RBC offers family as the ultimate connective tissue that ties together the imagined community of readers. Yet the work of Patchett also contains direct links to the contemporary literary field, ranging from the Lit-lit entanglement of Tom Lake with Thornton Wilder’s Our Town to the author’s own additional day job as owner of an independent bookstore in Nashville.28 The comprehensive grasp that RBC readers have of this literary field allows them to follow the trajectories of writers and other agents as its own kind of narrative entertainment (via various RBC social media channels and the weekly email newsletter). RBC readers participate in a consumerist version of female uplift that has turned the Bourdieusian model of literary capital struggle into a seemingly more benevolent publishing imaginary of conscious coexistence. Yet the most explicit drivers of this publishing imaginary are writers of color like Kuang and Williams, whose novels carry a higher burden of representation because of their intersectional linkage of female empowerment with Black or Asian American representation.
Today’s mainstream literary culture emerges from a hypercommodified marketplace. As one of the bigger players on the US book scene, RBC cannot overcome the basic critical contradictions between quality and commercialism already highlighted by Radway in A Feeling for Books. Readers may affectively identify with Ng’s and Williams’s protagonists in their quest for writerly autonomy and cultural impact. Yet the best the book club has to offer real-life readers who may also want to become writers are curated creativity shopping lists that include hand-embroidered notebooks from Etsy and high-end felt-tip pens from Target.29 Likewise, the rhetorical notion of the “book pick” obscures the unprecedented reach the book club has in not just consecrating or amplifying existing fiction but also in entering into earlier prepublication stages of book production. RBC acts in ways similar to insider stock trading: the club places bets on future sales and then rejoices in its own power to move markets. As a storytelling institution, however, RBC spins forth its own metanarrative intended to trigger feelings of participatory agency and a readerly sense of being directly responsible for the success of high-quality, female-centered literature. The serial nature of this monthly commercial and intellectual operation combines repetition with innovation, as any serial product of mass culture does. For the reader, the contents of each monthly pick will always be new and innovative, but the experience of buying a copy adorned with the RBC sunshine sticker reliably reproduces the satisfying collective experience of making a book a bestseller.
Acknowledgments
We thank Regina Schober and Emma Walker for providing feedback on draft versions of this essay.
Footnotes
↵1. In his survey of the state of research, Rosen highlights two discursive shifts that set this recent focus on institutions apart from earlier work: (1) a departure from framing literature as a social institution “toward a sociological approach that examines the many and varied organizations and institutions in and through which literature and its value are produced, distributed, and consumed,” and (2) a revisionist approach to earlier critiques of institutions “in favor of a more balanced view of institutions as enabling as well as constraining, and in some cases, an outright advocacy for their value and the need to conserve them.”
↵2. As Claire Squires comments in her response to the pieces in this ALH issue, some literary studies work identifies lacunae in publishing studies that do not actually exist; she points to a broad range of book and publishing historical scholarship that should inform this type of work.
↵3. Radway’s work on the Book-of-the-Month Club has been foundational; see also Norrick-Rühl; Rubin.
↵4. For a particularly instructive overview, see Long; see also qualitative field studies, such as Childress et al.
↵5. For an instructive study of how publishing houses use dedicated newsletters to target book club readers, see Rideout and Rehberg Sedo.
↵6. Oprah’s Book Club has received substantial academic treatment in work by Beth Driscoll (45–82); see also Hall; Illouz; Farr; Striphas (111–40).
↵7. On Kardashian-West’s book club, see Marsden and Branagh-Miscampbell; on Watson’s, see Ramdarshan Bold.
↵8. Two insightful online sources are a YouTube video on RBC selection mechanisms by Lauren Erickson and a similar blog post by Kasia Manolas. PW has regular features on RBC (e.g., Boog; Juris; PW Staff). While there is a dearth of scholarly attention to RBC, select journalists have covered Witherspoon’s foray into book recommendations at length. In 2024 alone, the New York Times and Esquire magazine ran long features centering Witherspoon’s influence on the book industry (Egan; Vershbow). A 2019 cover story for Vogue magazine chronicles her transition from the “American-sweetheart mode” of her early acting days into a more refined corporate player: “Witherspoon has become a formidable businesswoman, launching a company that has a hand in just about every imaginable sector of contemporary media.” Vogue goes on to call her a “formidable activist” as well (Daum).
↵9. Similar to our framing of the book club metanarrative, Illouz finds that there is “a great deal of narrative unity” between Oprah’s book picks as a serial body of texts and the individual episodes of the Oprah Winfrey Show (110).
↵10. This lack of criticism may also have to do with the trappings of algorithmic (book) culture today; see Murray (Digital). Analogously, in their overview of gatekeeping in publishing today, Caroline Koegler and Norrick-Rühl put traditional literary critics and new forms of reviews, such as online reviewing, Bookstagram and BookTok, on equal footing (77).
↵11. All the statistics relayed here are based on a spreadsheet compiled by our student research assistant Nayantara Srinivasan. See Norrick-Rühl et al. for the document collecting our raw data. While there were an additional eleven YA picks from 2020 to 2024, these have not been taken into account here. The spreadsheet records the following categories: author details (name, gender, race); book details (title, genre, imprint, publisher, publication month/year); and reception and adaptation details (awards, book club picks, existing film/TV adaptation or optioned/rights acquired/in development, involved production companies). For the complex category “race,” we adapted the methodology and categorization proposed by So in his study Redlining Culture, using either self-identification (e.g., author websites, social media, interviews) or explicit references in news articles or scholarly publications (see esp. 40–42, 193–94). We broke down So’s category of “people of color” to differentiate the numbers for Asian American and Hispanic/Latinx authors.
↵12. As in the work by So, the “not specified” column leaves room for speculation. The authors counted toward this category have not specified their racial identity in any publicity materials or paratexts to date. It is reasonable to assume, based on our research, that most authors here fall into the “white” category, which may thus actually represent roughly half of the club’s total selections.
↵13. We take our reference points regarding demographic percentages from publicly available US census data, as gathered and visualized on USAFacts.org (“Our Changing Population”).
↵14. See www.kirkusreviews.com; if more than one subgenre was listed, the first subgenre was transferred to the spreadsheet.
↵15. The considerable publicity surrounding the one-hundredth pick centered on the personal teacher-student connection between Renkl and Witherspoon, giving less attention to the content of Renkl’s meditative book of nature writing about the passing of the four seasons in her own backyard. In social media clips, circulated by Hello Sunshine, the two women meet up at the private, all-girls Harpeth Hall School in Nashville, where Renkl taught Witherspoon in the early 1990s. In announcing this pick, RBC leans into Witherspoon’s private reading life while drawing a connecting line between two literary institutions, the book club and the high school English classroom.
↵16. According to Penguin Random House’s “Publishing Jargon Buster,” a pre-empt is “an early offer for a publishing deal from an editor that is often regarded as ‘too good to refuse.’ If a pre-empt is accepted by the author and agent, it will result in the book being taken off the table and no bids from any other publishing houses will be accepted.”
↵17. Murray borrows the term “mid-level concept” from John Frow, who elaborated on this notion in the influential NLH special issue on “New Sociologies of Literature” from 2010.
↵18. The kind of media nostalgia triggered by Ng’s novel can symbiotically coexist in the RBC universe with intermedial extensions into television and digital media. The March 2019 RBC pick Daisy Jones and the Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reid, is one of the more formally innovative novels on the club’s list, pretending to be an oral-history-style transcript documenting the lives of the band members of a fictive 1970s rock ensemble. Choosing the interview style as the novel’s main conceit, Jenkins Reid already positioned her novel as highly adaptable. Witherspoon and Hello Sunshine developed the series for Amazon Prime Video, where it debuted in 2023. Aside from the mockumentary style, the novel presupposed the existence of several successful records produced by the band, providing the song lyrics for an album called Aurora in the appendix. Accompanying the series, an album of this name by “Daisy Jones and the Six” was actually recorded and became quite successful on Spotify and other streaming platforms.
↵19. For followers of the book club, Ng’s appraisal of the library as a vital place of cultural memory and personal growth links with the January 2019 pick, Susan Orlean’s The Library Book. Centering a wide-ranging historical narrative on the 1986 burning of the Los Angeles Public Library, Orlean shows this institution both as resilient and under continuous threat from political influence, arson, or natural disasters.
↵20. RBC’s May 2022 pick The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams, contains a similarly emphatic celebration of the transformative power of words, channeled through the coming-of-age-story of Esme, who engages in subversive feminist lexicography at the all-male editorial office of the Oxford English Dictionary around 1900.
↵21. Oprah’s Book Club recently found itself in the midst of a much-discussed literary scandal centered on multiculturalism when it picked Jeanine Cummins’s novel American Dirt in 2020. RBC has tacitly tried to turn the fallout of this publishing scandal surrounding its erstwhile rival book club into a net positive by selecting two Latina-authored books published by Flatiron Books, the same press that distributed Jeanine Cummins’s novel. In his dissection of the institutional story behind American Dirt, Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado holds that Flatiron Books currently attempts “to expand the representation of Latinx issues in a press seemingly otherwise committed to white writers, as well as a small group of African American authors” (327). The March 2024 pick, Anita de Monte Laughs Last, by Xochitl Gonzalez, tackles the gender and race bias of the US visual arts scene and may thus be read as an interart allegory of the literary field. Flatiron Books and RBC could be said to engage in institutional atonement for Oprah’s American Dirt fiasco while of course turning a handsome profit from the “growing Latinx market” (Sánchez Prado 376).
↵22. In Williams’s world of Black publishing professionals, the characters’ ethical and political stances are repeatedly undercut—often somewhat cynically—by the sociocultural positioning of each person. The commentator in question, a character named Kahlil, is “a thirty-seven-year-old cultural studies PhD who favored pastel Ralph Lauren chinos and bow ties” and who “was famous for writing tomes on systemic racism” while living with a “Swedish heiress” whose fortune facilitates the sumptuous lifestyle (51).
↵23. “There is a lot of pressure in the world about who is supposed to care about politics, who is supposed to be in charge, who is supposed to be an activist,” states the actor Kerry Washington in a recent profile piece on Witherspoon. “And Reese has given a very genteel, Southern, ladylike middle finger to all of it. She is going to care about who runs the country and who has power and intersectional feminism and remain the beautiful, blonde, genteel Southern woman that she is” (Washington; qtd. in Daum).
↵24. On current conversations regarding the aesthetic scope of Black literature in the US marketplace, see the review essays by Tyler Austin Harper on the “just literature problem” and by Ismail Muhammad on the “representation trap.”
↵25. It is clear that RBC incorporated this viewpoint as a reaction to the George Floyd protests and the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement. The July 2020 pick, Austin Channing Brown’s I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, came as a quick reaction to the Floyd murder in May that year. In a conversation published as a video on the RBC website, Witherspoon and Brown attempt to address issues ranging from colorblindness to white feminism (“Conversation”). In this dialogue, we see Witherspoon repeatedly speak in a first-person plural “we” that aims to represent not so much her as club leader but the collective of white women readers who follow RBC.
↵26. In an early dialogue sequence, Eva and Shane admit that their protagonists are directly based on each other. “No one was supposed to read Cursed,” Eva tells Shane. “I wrote it for myself, to get over you” (95). In reply, Shane confesses: “I wrote my books like you were the only one who’d ever read them” (96).
↵27. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois (2021) tells the coming-of-age-story of a young Black woman around the turn of the millennium. Her ultimate academic quest at the novel’s end is to write her PhD thesis in history by fusing archival research with interviews of elders from her extended family. Jeffers’s novel was an Oprah’s Book Club pick and won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award.
↵28. Witherspoon, incidentally, also lives in Nashville, where she founded the boutique Draper James, named for her grandparents. The boutique has expanded into a chain of three stores selling Southern home décor.
↵29. Shopping suggestions for pens, notebooks, and other supplies are a recurrent feature in RBC’s weekly email newsletter “The Shelf Life.”
This open access article is distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) and is freely available online at: https://cl.uwpress.org.
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