Reuters tells us that "Oprah's power of promotion [is] undimmed by Frey dispute," but the AP claims "Oprah's Latest Book Pick Raises Issues."

As it happens, both stories are true. Elie Wiesel's Night did become the #1 selling book at Amazon (and, presumably, bookstores across America) overnight after Oprah gave the Holocaust memoir her seal of approval...but there has historically been some question as to whether Night is a memoir, as it's currently billed, or an autobiographical novel, as it had been received by generations of junior high and high school students. In fact, as the AP reports, Amazon even had to go back and "fix" its categorization because, claimed a publicist, "[the] data source... inaccurately classified the book as fiction."

Actually, the bit that jumped out at me in the AP dispatch was the idea that a Syrcause literature professor has built an entire course around "the literature of trauma," in which the "trauma narrative" of Night must now be regarded as the only nonfiction in a syllabus that also includes Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Shirley Jackson, and George Orwell.* Regarded as nonfiction by everyone except Prof. Karen Hall, that is: "That Wiesel would prefer it to be called a memoir doesn't impact my understanding of the text, as once it has left the author's desk, it is the reader's to work with." It's refreshing to see postmodernism alive and well in academe, isn't it?

*You call that a trauma literature syllabus? I'll give ya We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but The Sign of Four? Howzabout Stephen King's Misery, Camus's The Plague, and, to get some nonfiction on the list, Lawrence Wright's Remembering Satan and Truddi Chase's When Rabbit Howls? Or the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft—now there's some serious trauma narrative for you.