Baltimore author Eric Puchner has already begun to experience firsthand the life-changing force of “The Oprah Effect.”

The publication of Puchner’s second novel, “Dream State” coincided with broadcast legend Oprah Winfrey’s announcement that she had selected his 448-page family saga as her next Book Club selection — and with Wednesday’s disclosure by the author’s talent agency that the novel has been optioned for a television series by the production company A24.

The announcement propelled the 54-year-old Johns Hopkins University professor, whose name previously was known primarily among a select literary few, into becoming something approaching a household name.

“I had made peace with the fact that I have a small fan base and was toiling in relative obscurity,” Puchner told the Sun. “My idea of success was getting a short story published in ‘Best American Short Stories.’ For this to happen is beyond my wildest dreams.”

Puchner, chairman of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, has previously published one novel and two short story collections. While all have received envy-inducing reviews and one won a Pushcart Prize, none were best sellers.

But within 48 hours of Puchner’s interview with Winfrey on her podcast, “Dream State” was the 23rd best-selling book of the tens of millions of fiction and non-fiction titles available on Amazon.com. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post published lengthy reviews.

“This is a piece of art,” Winfrey said of “Dream Stage” on her podcast. “It is a real page-turner, an emotional rollercoaster.”

Puchner said he has known since November that he had been selected for Oprah’s Book Club — a secret he kept from nearly everyone but his wife for more than three months.

“I was at a subcommittee meeting on the Hopkins campus,” Puchner said. “My agent told me that I had to leave the subcommittee meeting early to take this important call.

“I get terrible reception in my office, so I was crouched in my car in this kind of ugly parking lot. It was the week after the election, so I was destabilized already,” he said. “And then it was Oprah on the line. I almost dropped the phone.”

The so-called “Oprah Effect” has been credited by Fordham University Professor Al Greco with selling an average of nearly 786,000 extra copies for each title showcased by Winfrey in the 15 years between when the Book Club was founded in 1996 and 2011, when her first show went off the air. It is a statistic that made Puchner laugh a little in disbelief.

According to Forbes magazine, the late novelist Toni Morrison received a bigger sales boost from Winfrey’s Book Club, which promoted four of the author’s novels over the years, than she did from winning the 1993 Nobel Prize.

“Dream State” is set in Montana and near Puchner’s beloved Flathead Lake, where his wife’s family owns a house. It features a romantic triangle between a soon-to-be bride, her fiancé and the groom’s best friend.

The novel traces the reverberations of one weekend over 50 years and multiple generations, while also using that half-century time span to explore the impact of climate change in the American West.

Puchner told Winfrey that he wanted to write in “Dream State” about characters who struggle with regret.

“I’m the kind of person who can’t even order dinner without thinking immediately after I place the order, ‘Oh, I should have ordered something else,'” Puchner said.

“But it’s a dangerous mentality to fall through that trap door of thinking that life is elsewhere. It’s so easy to drift to that other life you might have had,” he said. “But part of learning how to live is learning how to live with regret and not letting it overshadow your happiness.”

Puchner was born in New Jersey and his family moved frequently as a child. Though he grew up thinking of himself as “a died-in-the wool-Westerner,” he has spent two lengthy stints in Baltimore.

He lived for six years in Guilford with his family between 1976 and 1972, and then returned to Charm City 11 years ago to take the job at Hopkins. He, his wife the novelist Katharine Noel and their two children, a 19-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son, live now in the Evergreen neighborhood.

“Baltimore is such an interesting place,” Puchner said. “It’s small, but it has this thriving culture of all these artists and writers.”

He is candid about the extent to which his novels and short stories are informed by his real life experiences. For instance, Puchner’s 2010 novel “Model Home” was inspired by a family crisis that occurred while he was growing up.

Puchner’s late father, a bank vice president “got involved in the savings and loan scandals in the 1980s,” the novelist said. “He would never talk about it. Then he got another woman pregnant and ran off with her.”

“Dream State,” in turn, chronicles the descent of Puchner’s now-deceased mother’s into dementia.

“I really didn’t feel like I had a choice but to write about my mother,” Puchner told Winfrey. “She was occupying my thoughts constantly. One of the things I tried to do is to capture dementia in the way it really is. Much of that stuff in the book actually happened.

“But I wanted her to have a voice while she was in the throes of her illness,” he said. “So at one point in the book I enter into her point of view and try to imagine what that must have been like for her. That was a really important step for me to take.”

Puchner said he is eager to get back to writing his third novel once the hoopla from “Dream State” dies down. His newest effort is still in the early stages so he won’t say much more other than: “I’ve never written a story in this genre before, and I’m really excited about it.”

But the commotion caused by Winfrey’s announcement doesn’t seem in danger of calming down anytime soon. Now, two of the author’s fondest hopes might soon be within his grasp.

“Having a book on the New York Times Best Seller list has been a dream of mine,” Puchner said. “My editor has all these complicated charts, and he thinks ‘Dream State’ will make it.

“I’ve also always fantasized about having a readership large enough so that some day, I would see someone I didn’t know reading my book. But that hasn’t happened.”

Yet.

Have a news tip? Contact Mary Carole McCauley at mmccauley@baltsun.com and 410-332-6704.