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Each month, I’m going to recommend my favorite new books. Why should you trust my suggestions? I read a lot of books. I edit Omnivoracious, the book blog of Amazon.com, and The Bygone Bureau. But mostly, I’m extremely optimistic about the current state of books. I believe the best literature is being written right now.

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Paul Auster is perhaps the most accessible writer of those considered to be part of the “high establishment.” And you know the echelon I mean—Roth, Morrison, DeLillo, McCarthy, etc. Yet his new novel, which comes out today, is too accessible, toeing a dangerous line somewhere between the inventive plots of Jonathan Lethem (one of Auster’s own protégés) and the facile sentences of Dan Brown.

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The writing is so fresh, so honest, so revealing, that at times the reader may feel that he should not be reading these notes – it is almost a violation of a cherished intimacy and, like the greatest of loves, something not meant to be known to any but the participants themselves.