Each week, we'll be letting you know about new releases the editors of O and Oprah.com couldn't stop reading. This week, we're in love with the memoir:

The Receptionist
Janet Groth

A young girl from Iowa moves to the big city, gets a job at a magazine, meets lots of fancy intellectuals, tries to turn herself into a personality—only to realize she's lost herself along the way. This sound like a familiar story? In the case of The Receptionist, it's not only true, but it also takes place in and around the fabled halls of The New Yorker, where Janet Groth was the 18th floor receptionist for 20 years.

Much of the story is envy-inducing. Groth dishes on nights listening to Thelonious Monk play jazz, drinking with Gloria Steinem; and being sent to a ball in the English countryside by Muriel Spark. On the other hand, Janet's meekness and her difficulty in persuading people to give her the respect she craves often undercut the glamour of the rarefied life she's found. For much of the book, she settles for the pleasure of being around brilliant people (both her colleagues and many lovers) as opposed to demanding, and getting, their real acknowledgment. A few recognize her talents, and many are kind, but she's frequently underappreciated and not sure how to change that. Groth, however, isn't a woman to give up, and by the end of the book, she finds her own delightful voice, which is the book's real pleasure.

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Ask Oprah or Cheryl Strayed a question about Wild

Are you reading Wild with us this summer? Oprah and author Cheryl Strayed are answering YOUR questions about this unforgettable memoir.

Colleen McMillan Asked: Can you tell us how you came up with the title?

See Cheryl's Video Response:




Do you have a question for Cheryl or Oprah about Wild? Ask away here!

Each week, we'll be letting you know about new releases the editors at O and Oprah.com couldn't stop reading. This week, we're in love with the novel:

Inside
By Alix Ohlin

Can any of us really save another person? Or is each of us solely responsible for his or her own life? That's the question lurking behind Alix Ohlin's astute novel, which follows three separate characters: Grace, a therapist who's consulting with a disturbed teenage girl; Mitch, also a therapist, who moves all the way to the Arctic trying to rescue a young Inuit who's lost his whole family; and Anne, a struggling actress, who lets a pregnant runaway move into her apartment—and take over. Ohlin is a master short-story writer (see Signs and Wonders), and the early chapters of the book may feel like discrete tales. Very soon, though, you'll see how they're all intertwined, not just in terms of the characters' shared pasts in Montreal but also in the struggle with self-isolation. "There is a difference between the facts of the person and the truth of him," Grace says, trying to connect with her lover, a depressed aid worker who's just attempted suicide. Like Mitch and Anne, she can't quite reveal herself to others, presenting one version of herself at home and another during counseling sessions. At times, she even declares, "People do whatever they want, no matter what we say." A surprise car accident, however, forces her to do what she most fears—let someone else save her.

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Join Oprah's Book Club 2.0
Ask Oprah or Cheryl Strayed a question about Wild

Are you reading Wild with us this summer? Oprah and author Cheryl Strayed are answering YOUR questions about this unforgettable memoir.

Book lovers, like parents, are often circumspect about naming their favorites. After all, you wouldn't want to hurt the feelings of all those other books you've loved. And besides, there are different kinds of favorites. There's the BFF (Book Favorite Forever), the well-worn paperback you've read over and over until it looks like it's been run over by a semi. There's the A-Student Favorite, the thinky book you admire, but would never take into the bathtub with you. And then there's the Forgotten Favorite. This favorite is a bittersweet affair. You love this book. You think everyone in the world should read this book. And yet, you've never met anyone else who's loved this book like you have, or for that matter, anyone who's read it. It's un-buzzed-about; it's un-award-laden; you greet a copy of it at a used book store with an utterance of complete shock. This book is yours and yours alone.

For me, the eerie, dark After Life, by Rhian Ellis, was one of those books. It's a novel you devour, admonishing yourself the whole time to slow down so you can enjoy each lovely sentence, but unable to resist the urge to plunge forward into the story. I couldn't believe this gorgeous book was out of print, particularly now that the supernatural is experiencing a bit of a media moment.

Well, apparently neither could Nancy Pearl, who runs the brilliant Amazon.com publishing imprint Book Lust Rediscoveries. Dedicated to reprinting overlooked gems from 1960-2000, this publishing outfit is reprinting After Life, which is great news for readers (even though it means I'll have to crown some other obscure novel my Forgotten Favorite). Check out the trailer:

Plus, the very existence of this publishing imprint inspires a kind of hope. After all, books aren't the only things that often go underappreciated.What if we all performed an act of rediscovery in our own lives? Think about something you accomplished or created or loved ten or twelve years ago -- something as big as a job or as small as a collage you made for an art class -- and take a moment to appreciate it, consider what kind of new life it might have now. An, ahem, After Life, if you will.

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Speaking of Rediscovery: Oprah's Book Club 2.0
Classics That Have Made a Difference to the Stars

"You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down."
-Ray Bradbury

The author of everyone's favorite assigned high-school reading, the visionary Ray Bradbury, has died at the age of 91. There are many very thorough remembrances of the man and his work out there. But when I heard this news, all I could think of was the story "The Third Expedition" in The Martian Chronicles (the book, incidentally, that first indicated to me, and so many others, all that the maligned genre of science fiction could be) in which the astronauts arrive on Mars only to find a place that looks a whole lot like the Earth of the past, peopled with their own long-dead friends and relatives. It all seems pretty fishy, but the astronauts can't help but give into their nostalgia, to their desire for it to be so. Mars, it seems, is heaven.

Well, (spoiler alert!) it doesn't turn out to be so: the idyllic world is actually a nasty trick on behalf of the hostile Martians. And when we read the story we feel a little foolish by the end, for wanting, as the astronauts did, the sunny, picture-perfect freeze-frame of Americana to be truly preserved up there on a rock in the sky, for believing for a few seconds that we were seeing heaven. Still, isn't it pleasant to think that somewhere in the universe, the people we miss are carrying on their lives on some sunny planet untouched by death? Isn't it pleasant to think that Ray Bradbury might be landing any minute?

Here, Bradbury shares his advice on how to live to be 90, and his take on the essence of life.

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Bradbury on his Love of Libraries
Bradbury on Life and Creativity

Each week, we'll be letting you know about new releases the editors at O and Oprah.com couldn't stop reading. This week, we're swooning over the dark, compassionate short-story collection:

Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain
By Lucia Perillo

"Don't tell me about bad boys," writes Lucia Perillo. "I've seen my black clouds come and go." What she's also seen are some pretty dark-minded women—from a solitary mother addicted to cough syrup to a mistreated housewife who dreams of armed robbery. In the hands of a less-talented writer, these characters would turn out hard-boiled and, worse, hard to love. Instead, Perillo infuses each one with joy and humor, celebrating the best intentions behind the worst choices. The stunner of the collection is "Big-Dot Day," in which a mother and her young son, Arnie, set off from Las Vegas to the Washington coast, following yet another "new guy," who has plans to work a salmon boat. Left alone in the motel room, Arnie hatches a plan to go fishing—and what he catches (hint: it's not a fish) turns out to be both amazing and hilarious yet so quietly indicative of this boy's loneliness that you have to sit for a while, contemplating how it is that we all survive growing up. Relentlessly compassionate, this is a collection for the mistake makers and trying-as-hard-as-we-canners of the world—which probably means all of us.

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"I cannot live without books."
--Lilli Leight, 15.
(--Also, Thomas Jefferson.)

No one reads books anymore. Especially not kids and teens. They're all tweetin' and textin' and emoticonning and watching 3-D YouTube videos on their hologram-lenses or whatever it is they do. Or anyway that's the story lately. Then an old-fashioned lady like myself hears about an intrepid young book lover like 15-year-old Lilli Leight and breathes a sigh of relief. Lilli loves books. She loves books so much that she was disturbed when she noticed that the children at the homeless shelter where she volunteered (is she the best kid in the world or what?) automatically turned on the center's TV when they had a free moment. Lilli told Publishers Weekly, " I realized that there were no books available to the children, and that no one ever thought to ask for a book.”

So she did what all 13-year-olds (as she was then) would do: she started a library. On her own. Read the whole article to find out how she acquired over 5,000 books for the homeless kids she works with. And the next time someone bemoans the state of today's youths, think of the library of Lilli Leight.

Read More:
The Best Ways to Teach Kids to Read
Reading Suggestions for Teens