Publishers across the city are presumably giddy as schoolgirls today over Friday's announcement that Oprah's Book Club — on hiatus for a year in wake of the James Frey debacle — is returning to the airwaves with an as-yet-unknown pick to be announced at the end of this week. Elie Wiesel's Night, the last Oprah pick — and not exactly an unknown work — sold more than 1.5 million copies after being tapped. So who will hit the jackpot now? The industry newsletter Publishers Lunch reads the Amazon tea leaves and determines that it's likely a HarperCollins trade paperback listed at $14.95. The Rupert Murdoch–owned Harper, of course, was most recently in the news for If I Did It, O.J.'s stillborn work of wit and wisdom. So it's pretty good time for the publisher to be getting a dose of Oprah-endorsed goodwill. And if it's true, well, we can't help thinking that a certain Australian billionaire owes the Chicago talk queen a drink the size of Lake Michigan.

Oprah's Book Club Returns With New Title [AP via Yahoo]