Rooney combines extensive research with a lively personal voice and engaging narrative style to untangle the myths and presuppositions surrounding the club, and reveal its complex and far-reaching cultural influence. Comprehensive and up-to-date, the book features a wide survey of recent commentary, and describes the Club's suspension of operations in April 2002, as well as its resumption in June 2003 with a new focus on "great books."

Adored by its fans, deplored by its critics, Oprah's Book Club has been at the center of arguments about cultural authority and literary taste since it began in 1996. "Reading with Oprah" explores the club's revolutionary fusion of books, television, and commerce and tells the engaging and in-depth story of the OBC phenomenon.Kathleen Rooney combines extensive research with a dynamic voice to reveal the club's far-reaching cultural impact and its role as crucible for the clash between "high" and "low" literary taste.Comprehensive and up-to-date, the book covers the club from its inception in...

This title offers an art model's take on taking it off. "Live Nude Girl" is a lively meditation on the profession of nude modeling - that 'spine-tingling combination of power and vulnerability, submission and dominance' - as it has been practiced in history and as it is practiced today. Kathleen Rooney draws on her own experiences working as an artist's model, as well as on the stories of famous, notorious, and mysterious artists and models through the ages. Combining personal perspective, historical anecdote, and witty prose, Rooney reveals that both the appeal of posing nude for artists and...

In this collection about life as a twentysomething in the twenty-first century, Kathleen Rooney writes with the finesse of someone well beyond her years, but with fresh insights that reveal a girl still making discoveries at every turn. Varied and original, the tales in For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs recount the perils of falling in love with the unlikeliest of people, of visiting the New York apartments of a vanished poet, and of touring an animal retirement home with her parents. Of getting a Brazilian wax, and of chauffeuring a U.S. senator around town. Of saying...

Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object is a lively meditation on the profession of art modeling as it has been practiced in history and as it is practiced today. Kathleen Rooney draws on her own experiences working as an artist's model, as well as the famous, notorious, and mysterious artists and models through the ages. Through a combination of personal perspective, historical anecdote, and witty prose, Life Nude Girl reveals that both the appeal of posing nude for artists and the appeal of drawing the naked figure lie in our deeply human responses to beauty, sex, love, and death.