It’s looking like a big year for books this fall. Regardless of your opinion of any or all of them, you can’t deny that a season packed with Brown, Conroy, Pynchon, Chabon, Lethem, Eggers, Irving, Byatt, et al., will be remarkable for an industry still trying to recover from the Harry Potter factory shutdown that laid off thousands. But will it be good? (I believe this article proves either that publishing people have been so fucked over as to be paranoid or that the arts press corps are so jonsesing for bad news that they’ll spike an ice cream with cyanide just to cover the kid dying.)

Even in historical context, the fall of 2009 strikes some as extraordinary.

“I have never seen another year like this,” said Sarah McNally, the owner of the popular Soho bookstore McNally Jackson. “I can hardly bear to think about fall’s books, it’s like looking bare-eyed into the sun.”

“I can’t really think of any time since I’ve been in the business, when I had a sense of the degree of anticipation for upcoming books, that would equal this fall,” said the Gernert Co. literary agent Chris Parris-Lamb.

With optimism, however, comes worry—particularly because shoving every major release into the same three months could very well result in a traffic jam that will benefit no one.

“Given that the odds of all the books living up to the author’s and publisher’s expectations are quite slim, it’s a little intimidating,” said Martha Levin, the publisher of Simon & Schuster’s Free Press imprint. “There will be books that get buried in the crush and will not sell as well as did the author’s previous book. It’s inevitable. As a publisher, you stick with the attitude that your books will prevail—until proven to the contrary.”

“But yes,” she added. “It is exciting. Just kind of scary too.”