We have been waiting to launch the Books section of wowOwow.com since we were born four months ago. So many of our Contributors are successful authors and more often than not they’ve written books that went on to become lasting bestsellers, in fact, the list is so illustrious and plentiful, we created a whole page just for them.

I take a personal interest in this section as I spent more than 35 years in the book industry — privileged to have been editor of Candice Bergen’s Knock Wood; the publisher of Peggy Noonan’s What I Saw at the Revolution; and the literary agent representing Liz Smith’s Natural Blonde and Dishing, Mary Wells’s A Big Life in Advertising and five additional bestsellers by Peggy Noonan. Books have been my life’s passion.

Literature has always been a woman’s domain (we account for 80 percent of fiction readers) and so it’s a thrill for wowOwow.com to introduce a new section devoted to literature. Through interviews, reviews, sample chapters, recommended reading lists, polls and more we hope to introduce you to wonderful discoveries in every category of the literary world. And we hope you’ll do the same — share your passions and favorite writers with the entire wOw community.

To kick off our Book Launch today we introduce our Classics Pick of the Month with an introduction by Judith Martin to one of her favorite novels, The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. The Modern Library has kindly provided us with the first three chapters for you to read right away; click here to read it on-screen or feel free to print it out and read it the old-fashioned way, curled up on the couch with a cup of tea. We hope to bring you a new classic each month.

And, of course, we’re very interested to hear what your favorite classic novel is, so we’ve taken the Modern Library Board’s controversial and much-discussed list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century – published exactly ten years ago this month – and have created an interactive poll. Please scroll through the list and rate the books, using the star system to indicate your preferences for next month’s pick. Soon we’ll tally the results and share the results.

We’ve also invited authors to our party, and we kick off today with a wonderful piece by the bestselling thriller writer Sandra Brown, who recounts how she broke the glass ceiling of the thriller genre. Earlier this month, Sandra was the first woman to receive the prestigious ThrillerMaster Award, presented by the International Thriller Writers in recognition of outstanding contribution to the genre. 

In a regular new feature, “What We’re Reading Now,” our Contributors will share their current favorites. And, of course, we want most of all to know what YOU are reading.

We are blessed with another party guest: Roxanne Coady, the much-loved owner of one of America’s greatest independent bookstores, R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison, CT.  She has an uncanny – and much-celebrated – talent for putting the right book into the hands of any customer, no matter the age. She has opened up her doors to the wOw community and every couple of weeks will give us a field report from a truly great bookstore, giving us an inside track on what to read. 

We will also be interviewing authors in The Book Party. Be sure to visit wOw next month to read Lesley Stahl’s interview with Curtis Sittenfeld, bestselling author of Prep and author of the hot new novel American Wife. To help us celebrate our new book section, Curtis’s publisher, Random House, has given wOw an exclusive first: We have a stack of early reader’s copies of American Wife that we’ll give away to the first 15 people who e-mail us the required info* at submit@wowowow.com.

Happy reading!

*Click here for official rules, terms and conditions.