PW lives in the future. (But only slightly, three months to be exact.) Which means that while everyone else is enjoying autumn, we’re in December, huddling between stacks of dog-eared galleys, agonizing over our best books list. We’re having spirited cubicle confabs and doing loads of rereading, waiting and hoping for that click in the brain—there really should be a word for it—when you realize the book you’re reading isn’t just good, it’s special. The click in the brain that signals, yes. This book I will revisit and recommend.

It’s such a distinct moment (for me, at least) that I can almost always pinpoint the moment—down to the page number—I felt it happen. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides: page 94. Michael Lewis's Boomerang, out on Monday: page 6 (yes, really). Touré’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness: page 32 (see our interview with Touré below). Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories: still waiting.

And there’s a powerful instinct, especially after 2010’s abundance (Just Kids! The Warmth of Other Suns! The Interpreter of All Maladies!) to make comparisons. Is Stone Arabia this year’s A Visit from the Goon Squad? Stripped of its sophistries, The Marriage Plot features a love triangle much like the one in Freedom; will its reception resurrect last year’s debates that when men write about love and domesticity, they’re channeling Tolstoy, but when women do it, it’s chick lit?

And happily, this process isn’t in vain. As my interview with Rebecca Fitting, co-owner of Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore, reveals, best of the year lists exert a powerful influence over publishers and readers.

Two things occur to me now. First, that this tendency to interpret “clicks” in the brain as indications of literary merit as opposed to something that ought to be checked out by a medical professional is problematic. Second, that these “spirited cubicle confabs” and endless hashing out of what books are great and why are par for the course at PW—whether it’s best books season or not. And this new section and newsletter is intended to be your backstage pass. We’ll be in the magazine and online, highlighting each week’s must-reads and looking at how books are faring in the intellectual and commercial agora.

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