Oprah Winfrey’s book club will soon get the audio treatment thanks to an exclusive deal with Apple Podcasts.
Oprah’s Book Club will release episodes twice weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays on Apple Podcasts, beginning Sept. 8. Each episode will feature Winfrey and an author in conversation with various high-profile guests to discuss a popular book or novel.
The first installment is an eight-part series on Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson’s best-selling book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” Each part of the series will feature Winfrey and Wilkerson talking to a different person about the pillars of caste Wilkerson analyzes in her book.
Winfrey said in a press release that “Caste” is one of the “most profound books” she’s ever read. According to Winfrey, Wilkerson’s book “provides a new way of seeing racial inequality, giving rise to countless ‘aha’ moments and helping us truly understand America as it is now and how we hope it will be.”
The Oprah Winfrey Show launched Oprah’s Book Club as a segment in 1996. Since then, Winfrey’s used her place as a cultural icon to influence what society is reading — often books with a focus on social justice or self-betterment.
Winfrey extended the Oprah’s Book Club to a television deal last year, when she inked a multi-year deal to distribute the Book Club on Apple TV+ and the Apple Books app. A condensed interview between Winfrey and Wilkerson will be available to stream on Apple Music. Apple also announced that Winfrey will curate select articles related to the book and the conversations about it for the Apple News app.
“I am honored and thrilled that ‘Caste’ has been chosen for Oprah’s Book Club and that its humanitarian insights will now reach a wider audience,” Wilkerson said in a statement. “This work shows that the term racism may be insufficient in our current era. We need new language, a new framework for understanding our divisions and how we got to where we are (and) ‘Caste’ gives us this language.”
Check out the trailer and first episode of the Oprah’s Book Club podcast here.
Leave a Reply