Sideshow | Oprah picks a literary giant

Remarkable by any standards sacred or profane,

haute culture

or trash TV, Emersonian transcendentalism or

Deepak-Chopra

-Cracker-Jack-box spiritualism,

Oprah Winfrey

is taking her book club in a yet-more-remarkable, high-art direction. The goddess of daytime TV, doyenne of New Age spiritualism, and Queen of Chicago yesterday announced that her next book-club selection is the apocalyptic novel - and a top pick for the next Pulitzer Prize -

The Road

by

Cormac McCarthy

, the 73-year-old literary scrivener whom Yale's genius-meter

Harold Bloom

has anointed one of our greatest writers.

"I promise you, you'll be thinking about it long after you finish," said Oprah of the book, a real downer that follows the dazed wanderings of a father and his young son through a bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape. She said it was "very unusual for me to select this book, but it's fascinating."

Most remarkable, a rep for McCarthy said the famously reclusive novelist "knew who [Oprah] was when she called." Paul Bogaards said McCarthy would be giving his very first TV interview - like ever - to Oprah in the near future. "Mr. McCarthy respects her work, admires what she has accomplished," Bogaards said.

The cover art for

J.K. Rowling

's seventh and final Harry Potter book,

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

, has been released. There are three versions. The U.S. version is pretty but ominous. The words

Deathly Hallows

are in a red, ghostly script. Delicate yet foreboding they are. The book will be out July 21.

Megablockbusterhead

Tom Cruise

's decision to play the man who became famous for almost assassinating

Adolf Hitler

has raised the ire of the man's family and groups of history buffs.

Caspar Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, one of the 12 grandchildren of Claus von Stauffenberg, tells Germany's Bild am Sonntag newspaper that he doesn't object to the film, its subject matter, or its director, Bryan Singer. It's Cruise's professed faith that bothers him. He said he and "other family members are worried that the picture will be financed by [Scientologists] and be used to get across its propaganda."

But von Stauffenberg conceded he couldn't do anything to stop the production. "My grandfather is a figure from history," he said.

"You still haven't changed. . . . Don't go near my mother ever again."

So went, according to an unnamed source cited by the New York Post, a phone confrontation between freshly rehabbed Lindsay Lohan and her jailbird dad, Michael Lohan, released from a correctional institution March 13 after a 20-month stretch for drunken driving. Michael, who has hoped for a reconciliation with his daughter since, like, forever, says he found religion while behind bars.

The much-ballyhooed kiss between two female

Friends

alumnae on FX's

Dirt

came and went Tuesday night.

Jennifer Aniston

guest-starred in the show's season finale as

Courteney Cox

's old friend and rival. Story is, the two once shared an erotic night together. And at one point in Tuesday's episode, they kiss. Aniston, who plays a lesbian, is mildly turned on. Cox indifferent. Audience asleep.

The sexiest bit came during a commercial break, in a steamy ad for Ocean's Thirteen featuring Aniston's ex, Brad Pitt.

. . . can't be wrong. Can they?

In the age when the quality of a movie is judged by the quantity of consumers who line up at the trough, why even wait till the thing's finished? Why not decree a flick a great classic on the strength of how many saw the trailer?

Check it, cats: 350 mil people saw the theatrical trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End - in a 24-hour period. It happened, this miracle, "as a result of a carefully coordinated global launch effort," a news release proclaimed.

The movie will be out in May.

Project Runway

, among a handful of very watchable reality shows, won a GLAAD award Monday for outstanding reality program at the 18th Annual GLAAD Media Awards. Sponsored by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, the award "honors mainstream media for their fair, accurate and inclusive representations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community."

The larger-than-life entertainer

Hilary Duff

tells People she had an awkward run-in with her former love,

Joel Madden

. "I just did [MTV's

Total Request Live

] today and Joel was there and it was the first time we'd seen each other and it was so, like, nerve-racking," said Duff with characteristic eloquence and charm. "I knew that he was going to be there and he knew. It is what it is." (And what it was is what it was.)

Duff owned the 28-year-old punk rocker for 21/2 years.

The little book in which

O.J. Simpson

discussed how he would theoretically have killed his ex-wife,

Nicole Brown

, and her friend

Ronald Goldman

, had he done the deed, is being put to some constructive use.

Rights to the tome will be sold April 17 at a court-ordered auction in Sacramento, Calif., with proceeds going to help pay the $33.5 mil civil judgment rendered against O.J. in a wrongful death suit that Goldman's family won in '97.

If I Did It made headlines in November when Rupert Murdoch canceled a TV special about the book, quashed its publication, and killed the career of O.J.'s publisher, Judith Regan, in response to outrage over the book.