Latest news with #BookClub
USA Today
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Why Oprah Winfrey 'would never' go to space like best friend Gayle King
Oprah Winfrey isn't joining her bestie Gayle King by going to space any time soon. The ex-"Oprah Winfrey Show" host got candid on the July 16 episode of the SiriusXM show "Let's Talk Off Camera with Kelly Ripa" about why she skipped going on the infamous Blue Origin flight in April with her BFF. "I would never do it, but I became very interested in the whole process," Winfrey said. The Oprah's Book Club creator told Ripa that she was "just so proud to be there for" King, adding she was "relieved" that the "CBS Mornings" host went to space, "because if she'd asked one more time, 'What should I do? Do you think I should go?' I, from the beginning, was like, 'You should do it.'" Winfrey also revealed that she told King not to "let Katy Perry come down and say, 'It was really great fun.'" Kelly Ripa shuts down Mark Consuelos' 'repulsive' morning habit For the mission, King joined pop star Perry and billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' now-wife and author Lauren Sánchez Bezos along with three others for the first all-female flight to space in decades. However, the flight from Bezos-backed exploration company Blue Origin garnered widespread criticism. Still, Winfrey encouraged King to adventure. "You're going to be really saying, 'I should have done it,'" she recalled telling King. "The minute somebody says, 'Oh my God, like a life changing experience,' you're going to go, 'Oh, I should have done it.'" Oprah says July book club pick hooked her 'until the very last shocking sentence' The "Oprah Winfrey Show" star confessed that she knew it was time to leave her eponymous daytime talk show, which ended in 2011, when her team suggested they send an audience to space. "I remember going into a meeting and someone saying, 'I think what we should do is try to get people on a spaceship, or we should be able to take an audience or some audience members up on a spaceship,'" Winfrey said. Oprah Winfrey tells Kelly Ripa not to 'walk away' from 'Live' talk show After making the admission, Winfrey gave her fellow talk show host a word of advice and told her that "it's not time for you to step away" from "Live," which Ripa hosts with husband and actor Mark Consuelos, because "you have fun and it's easy and it's light enough. And serious enough when it needs to be, and it's not a grind." The "Oprah Podcast" host said that she loved hosting her own show, but it was different than Ripa's because the "Oprah" show dealt with heavier topics, sharing with the "All My Children" alum that "the nature of what we were doing every day became just so hard." Gayle King on 'disrespectful' space backlash, celebrity friends 'throwing shade' "Don't let go of the platform that you have. Do not do it. Don't even consider it," Winfrey said. "Because I feel that the reach that you have, the audience that you've built, the family that you've created – both inside the studio and in the rest of the world – is really more vital and important now than ever before."
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley review – teenage mothers and melodrama
Writers sometimes talk of giving birth to their books, but probably very few are also working as doulas. It's an experience that clearly informs Leila Mottley's new novel, The Girls Who Grew Big, in which the struggles of pregnancy and motherhood loom large. Mottley's work as a doula comes in addition to writing a bestselling debut novel, Nightcrawling, and featuring on Oprah's Book Club; she was also youth poet laureate of Oakland, California, in 2018. But not much seems beyond the reach of the youngest ever writer to be longlisted for the Booker prize, back in 2022. The pity is that her considerable energy hasn't translated into a more satisfying second book. The Girls Who Grew Big tells the story of a gang of teenage mothers and the impromptu community they form in the humid disarray and general dysfunction of Padua, a fictional small town in the Florida panhandle. Led by their de facto leader, Simone, the Girls are a scrappy, ostracised handful of outsiders, variously rejected by their families and harshly judged by locals. Down on their luck and often abandoned by the adults in their lives, they resourcefully become a collective, based in the back of Simone's truck. At 20, Simone is the eldest, the mother of five-year-old twins Lion and Luck. When she finds herself unhappily pregnant again, she turns to the Girls for help. Among them is 17-year-old Emory, whose white family are appalled by her black boyfriend. She comes to the Girls when struggling to breastfeed her baby boy, Kai, and finds practical advice, sisterhood and support. Then new girl Adela washes up in town: a champion swimmer with college ambitions, exiled from her former life by an unplanned pregnancy and sent to stay with her grandmother for nine months. Emory is immediately infatuated, and soon the Girls find their community disrupted. Those are the bones of the book, and there's clearly something potent here: the raw lives of teenage mothers, the fierce bonds forged in adversity, the alarmingly unequal access to good-quality maternity care in contemporary America. And yet The Girls Who Grew Big ultimately lands awkwardly, emerging as a mawkish paean to motherhood. This is a well-meant novel about decent things – sisterhood and solidarity – but its sentiment is never more sophisticated than this, and the writing too often sinks into the syrupy. Nightcrawling, Mottley's novel about an impoverished teenage sex worker in Oakland who ends up at the centre of a police corruption case, was a startling debut: miraculously lucid, politically pointed and tenderly wrought. But in The Girls Who Grew Big, when Mottley reaches for gritty realism, she often gives us something that feels gratuitous instead. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The novel opens, for instance, with Simone chewing through not one but two umbilical cords as she gives birth to twins in the back of her boyfriend's truck. It's certainly striking, but it also reads like an unnecessary provocation. Simone reasons that her teeth are preferable to her boyfriend's dirty pocket knife, 'crusted in dried brown blood, shed fur from some long-dead animal, and Lord knows how many fishes' yellowed intestines', as Mottley seems intent on challenging the reader from the first. Later, calling in a favour, Simone reminds Emory that she 'sucked on her nipple just last week to get a clogged duct to flow again'. Birth is messy and women's bodies are unruly: Mottley insists we confront this. Her prose relishes the blood and milk, straight talk sometimes curdling into something more callow and needlessly graphic. Setting the novel in Florida allows Mottley dramatic licence and she makes the most of it. She has a hurricane hit Padua, and the Girls flee from it in their wildly veering vehicle. A storm fells a tree, which inconveniently closes the local Planned Parenthood clinic. An alligator turns up at Emory's high school like a bad omen. An orca beaches itself as if summoned by the novel's own need for symbolism and the Girls duly scramble to save it. Drama is Mottley's preferred mode, and the set pieces – a cat fight between Adela and Simone; a tense reveal between Adela and her new boyfriend – feel melodramatic rather than real. But the Mottley of Nightcrawling is here too, writing with poetic clarity in fleeting moments. She is excellent at capturing the mysterious quality of this neglected patch of Florida: its close, salty air, its turquoise waters and its white sands. She is believable on passion. When Emory gazes at Adela, she feels 'a crazed swirl at the bowl of [her] body', and she longs 'to know everything about her, even when she only gave me fractions'. But too often The Girls Who Grew Big feels overly ambitious, a virtuous rhapsody, determined to say something transcendent about young motherhood but stuck peddling folksy wisdom instead. The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley is published by Fig Tree (£16.99). To support the Guardian buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Forbes
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Today's ‘Wordle' #1482 Hints, Clues And Answer For Thursday, July 10th
How to solve today's Wordle. Looking for Wednesday's Wordle hints, clues and answer? You can find them here: It's Thor's Day again, which means Odin has his day yesterday, which also means that yesterday was Wordle Wednesday and I gave you a rather puzzling puzzle to solve prior to tackling the daily Wordle. I'll post the answer below. First, here was the puzzle: Five animals gather at a round table for their first Book Club meeting. They're trying to decide which author to read. Each animal has brought a snack. The animals are Bear, Porcupine, Otter, Fox and Owl. Each animal sits at a numbered chair, 1-5. The snacks they've brought are Pretzels, Cookies, Chips, Muffins and Fruit. The books they've brought are by Austen, Orwell, Tolkien, Shelley and Dostoevsky. Using the following clues, determine which animal brought which author and snack and where they're seated at the table. Here is a seating chart. 'Across from' or 'Directly across from' refers to any points connected by the lines. The Puzzle It helps solve this puzzle if you use the layout above and sort of fill in the blanks as you go. Each clue gives you a tiny piece of information and all of them combined provide you enough info to get to this final layout: The solution Seat #1: Porcupine — Tolkien — Muffins Seat #2: Owl — Shelley — Fruit Seat #3: Fox — Orwell — Cookies Seat #4 Otter — Austen — Chips Seat #5: Bear — Dostoevsky — Pretzels Nobody messaged me the answer to this so I assume it was just too much work. I promise, next week's will be easier. Now let's solve today's Wordle! How To Solve Today's Wordle The Hint: Nervous, fidgety. The Clue: This Wordle ends in a 'Y'. Okay, spoilers below! The answer is coming! . . . Today's Wordle Every day I check Wordle Bot to help analyze my guessing game. You can check your Wordles with Wordle Bot right here. This was a tough one! Even the Wordle Bot struggled. CHORE left me with 454 remaining words and STAIN only cut that to 35. I had exactly 0 green or yellow boxes, but that's true of the Bot as well. BULKY cut that number down to 15, which left me in a tight spot. So many very similar words remained. I went with DUMPY and that left me with just 1: JUMPY for the win. Thank goodness...I was getting a little jumpy! Today's Wordle Bot The Bot and I each get -1 for guessing in five and 0 for tying. Our July totals become: Erik: -4 points Wordle Bot: 6 points The word jumpy is an informal adjective formed from jump + -y, meaning 'apt to jump.' It originated in American English around 1889 to describe someone nervous, skittish, or easily startled—like someone ready to jump at any sudden movement. Let me know how you fared with your Wordle today on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. Also be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me here on this blog where I write about games, TV shows and movies when I'm not writing puzzle guides. Sign up for my newsletter for more reviews and commentary on entertainment and culture.
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
Prime Day book deals: 23 top picks to shop and read now
Shop Prime Day 2025 book deals on romance, 'GMA' Book Club faves and more. Sponsored Content by Taboola
Yahoo
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Oprah says July book club pick hooked her 'until the very last shocking sentence'
Oprah Winfrey's latest book club selection is a high-octane family drama swirling with artificial intelligence ethics. 'Culpability' by Bruce Holsinger (out now from Spiegel & Grau) is the July pick for Oprah's Book Club, and the mogul is already dubbing it "the book of the summer." This is Winfrey's 116th book club selection, and Holsinger's novel joins a 2025 roster that includes Ocean Vuong, Wally Lamb and Tina Knowles. 'I appreciated the prescience of this story,' Winfrey said in a statement. 'It's where we are right now in our appreciation and dilemmas surrounding Artificial Intelligence, centered around an American family we can relate to. I was riveted until the very last shocking sentence!' 'Culpability' is set on a summer rental on the Chesapeake Bay and follows the Cassidy-Shaws – leading AI expert Lorelei, husband Noah, tweens Alice and Izzy and teenager Charlie – whose autonomous minivan collides with another car. Each family member has a secret that implicates them in the accident. Their weeklong stay is an unraveling of moral dilemmas, skeletons in the closet and AI consequences. In an announcement on her Instagram, Winfrey called 'Culpability' 'a book that's perfect for your beach bag.' 'Let me just tell you, Gayle King was so riveted that she was reading this book in the car on the way to the Tonys,' Winfrey said in a video. Holsinger is both a fiction and nonfiction writer, the author of five novels, including 'The Displacements' and 'The Gifted School.' He is also a professor at the University of Virginia. "Oprah Winfrey started her book club the same year I finished graduate school,' Holsinger said in a statement. 'For nearly thirty years, as I've taught great books to college students in the classroom and the lecture hall, she has shared great books with the world. Her phone call was like a thunderbolt, and I'll never forget it. I am deeply honored and profoundly grateful that she found Culpability worthy of her time, praise, and recognition." Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY's Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you're reading at cmulroy@ This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Oprah's July book club pick 'Culpability': 'Riveting' family drama
