[caption id="attachment_1497" align="aligncenter" width="522"] Jesse Bering's Bookshelf[/caption] With more and more books published every year, it's increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Does this increase the usefulness of all the annual "Best of" lists? Perhaps. It's irresistible when a critic distills a year of reading into a simple hierarchy, especially if her tastes match your own. It's just so efficient. I tend to eschew those books awarded the most (or loudest) hosannas in favor of the previously unknown novels that slipped past me at publication. (This year it's Ben Lerner's excellent Leaving the Atocha Station.) Sites like Salon, The Millions, and The Guardian go straight to the authors for their recommendations. I decided to do the same, canvassing our writers and editors. With a couple caveats: First, the editors couldn't choose their own titles; Second, one's choices didn't need to be published in 2011, just read in 2011. Old classics and novels from 2010 and 2009 are all welcome. Some submitted a straightforward list, while others penned brief summaries. (The Spanish-Argentinian novelist Andrés Neuman even separated his list by language.) I hope you'll find your next favorite book among them. Favorite Reads from 2011:

We created Work in Progress to highlight, among other things, the debut fiction we're excited about at the FSG offices. It doesn't matter if you've read fiction for five or fifty years, there's nothing quite like the thrill of discovering a new voice. This August we're publishing one such novel, Amy Waldman's The Submission. It has already garnered a suite of starred pre-publication reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist. Richard Price (Lush Life, "The Wire") writes, "Amy Waldman’s The Submission is a wrenching panoramic novel about the politics of grief in the wake of 9/11. From the aeries of municipal government and social power, to the wolf-pack cynicism of the press, to the everyday lives of the most invisible of illegal immigrants and all the families that were left behind, Waldman captures a wildly diverse city wrestling with itself in the face of a shared trauma like no other in its history."