NEW YORK (AP) — Nothing is predictable about Oprah Winfrey’s book picks — except for their sales.Once associated with inspirational narratives such as Jacqueline Mitchard’s “The Deep End of the Ocean”, Winfrey has been increasingly willing to take on the most challenging books and the most challenging writers.

Over the past few years, she has recommended novels by Faulkner, Tolstoy and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, even as she advocates diet and self-help books, such as Rhonda Byrne’s million-selling “The Secret”, when not choosing works for her club.

This week, she announced her new club selection: Jeffrey Eugenides’ “Middlesex”, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel narrated by a hermaphrodite — someone with both male and female sexual organs — and aired a talk with her previous pick, Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s first ever television interview.

“I am proud to be in the same company as Tolstoy and Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy,” Eugenides (pictured) said in an interview from his home in Chicago.

“The image Oprah Winfrey has had just isn’t true,” said Jonathan Galassi, publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which released Eugenides’ novel in 2002. “It seems that the club has been going more up market. I think she must have found that readers responded well to those kinds of books.”

The 73-year-old McCarthy has spoken with the press just twice before — both times for print publications — in the past 40 years, but he opened up for Winfrey. The author said he has nothing against the media; he just doesn’t like talking about what he does — a trait Winfrey illustrated with a story about how McCarthy, when he had no money years ago, refused a speaking engagement that would have paid him $2,000.

“You work your side of the street, I’ll work mine,” he said in an interview that was taped at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.

Dressed in a blue work shirt open at the collar and tan slacks, the author looked trim and much younger than his age. He sat slouched in an arm chair and spoke calmly, carefully, in a low, rumbling voice. His answers were thoughtful, even when the questions seemed to make him a bit uncomfortable, as when Winfrey asked whether “The Road” was “a love story to your son.”

“It was kind of refreshing how he didn’t seem to be aware of the camera, or play to the camera at all, as so-called professional authors do,” Eugenides said. Known for his rural settings, biblical prose and affinity for bygone worlds, McCarthy said that while typically he doesn’t know where the ideas for his books originate, he can trace “The Road” to a trip he took with his young son to El Paso, Texas, about four years ago. “The Road” was this year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.