Oprah's Latest Book Club Pick

Oprah's latest book club pick is The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. Oprah thinks "this book is right up there with the greatest American novels ever written." A review from O: The Oprah Magazine states: "Wroblewski's plot is dynamic--page by page compelling--and classical, evoking Hamlet, Antigone, Electra, and Orestes, as Edgar tries to avenge his father's death and his paternal uncle's new place in the affections of his mother. The scope of this book, its psychological insight and lyrical mastery, make it one of the best novels of the year." David Wroblewski grew up in rural central Wisconsin, not far from the Chequamegon National Forest, where ''The Story of Edgar Sawtelle'' is set. In an interview with Jenny Stark which appeared in ''New West'', Wroblewski described his novel " I think this novel is as a story haunted by another story—two stories in fact. The other being the Mowgli stories from Kipling. I certainly don’t consider Edgar a “retelling” of Hamlet — that implies a degree of adherence to plot structure and dramatis personae that I continually tried to subvert. I understood that the Sawtelle dogs were Edgar’s Denmark. I also knew that I wanted to draw on some of Shakespeare’s other plays, snatching bits like the witches in ''MacBeth'', or the blindness in ''Lear''. In almost all other ways, however, I let the story wander without any requirement to ever coincide with ''Hamlet'', and in fact mostly it doesn’t. The imperative was for Edgar’s present story to be compelling, everything else was a distant second....Curiously, no one ever asks about the connection to Kipling’s ''The Jungle Book'', even though it is explicitly referenced in the text. (Hamlet never is—with the single exception of the phrase “Remember me.”) If we could ask Edgar what story most closely parallels his life, he’d point to Mowgli in an instant. '' The Story of Edgar Sawtelle '' is Wroblewski's first novel.