March 16, 2011 When the Queen of Daytime TV first launched her on-screen book club, she also launched the careers of any number of literary novelists who had labored in obscurity, if not outright poverty, until touched by Oprah’s golden wand. Former Nashvillian A. Manette Ansay earned enough money from the Oprah-fueled sales of her novel, Vinegar Hill, to seek a cure for the mysterious affliction that had kept her confined to a wheelchair for two decades: “The bottom line here is extraordinary good luck,” she writes on her website. If Oprah hadn’t happened to pick up a book I’d written at the age of 25, I would not be walking today. I would not have a child. Sometimes, I wonder if I’d even be alive.”

March 15, 2011 Daniel J. Sharfstein writes the best kind of history book: one that explains what really happened to human beings of earlier days, and why the truth of their lives is more nuanced and less straightforward than received wisdom tends to suggest. In The Invisible Line, Sharfstein tells the stories of mixed-race people in the nineteenth century who managed–almost always through unstated collusion with their white neighbors–to defy the so-called “one-drop rule,” which held that anyone with a single drop of African blood was by definition black.