Of all the lists, this is the one I most look forward to each year.

Publishers Weekly consistently creates the most surprising and idiosyncratic Best Books of the Year lists in the industry. Lighter on commercial hits and popular book club picks than other major lists, the PW lists make more space for non-Big 5 releases and under-the-radar selections.

To wit: this year’s top 10 includes Booker Prize contender (and Book Riot house fave) Audition by Katie Kitamura and literary horror star Stephen Graham Jones’s The Buffalo Hunter Hunter alongside a 624-page history of capitalism and the third novel in a planned seven-book series from a small press about a woman trapped in a time loop.

In addition to the top 10, Publishers Weekly offers category-specific lists for fiction, nonfiction, mystery/thriller, poetry, romance, sci-fi/fantasy/horror, comics, religion, lifestyle, picture books, middle grade, and young adult. Happy browsing. – RS

Here’s what you do when Zadie Smith has a new book out: you clear the calendar, brick your phone, and prepare to have your perspective expanded.

In Dead and Alive, Smith displays the width of her range and the depth of her intellect in essays offering art criticism, remembrance of deceased writers ("Daughters of Toni," about Toni Morrison, is especially lovely), race, travel, and modern geopolitics. Pro tip: listen to it on audio. She’s a one-of-a-kind narrator.

Also hitting shelves this week:

• 🔪 A new collection of classic and rediscovered essays by Anthony Bourdain—we’ve never stopped missing him
• 📚 A book-within-a-book story about friendship, obsession, and forgiveness that is earning comps to Nabokov and Gabriel García Márquez
• 🎬 Filmmaker and former rock critic Cameron Crowe’s memoir
• 🥪 The follow-up to Catherine Newman’s Sandwich

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If it’s been a while since you read To Kill a Mockingbird, this week’s episode of Zero to Well-Read is for you.

It’s one of America’s most beloved books. It’s also one of America’s most banned books. It’s a classic. It’s controversial. It’s a novel that has launched a thousand takes. And it’s also a lot funnier than you might remember.

🎧 Listen as we try to separate the book from the discourse and reckon with what To Kill a Mockingbird means today.

In a major win for the right to read, a federal judge ruled in favor of plaintiffs in a two-year-long court case that challenged the constitutionality of a 2023 Texas law. 

The Texas READER Act would have required book vendors to rate the “sexual explicitness” of the books they sell before public schools in the state could purchase materials from them. The judge ruled that forcing booksellers to apply such ratings would be a violation of their constitutionally protected right to free speech.

Book People v. Morath is one of several high-profile lawsuits related to book censorship to render a verdict in recent weeks. It also further muddies the water of where First Amendment Rights begin and end when it comes to materials in public schools and public libraries. 

• In early October, a Florida District Court judge ruled that neither library patrons nor authors have First Amendment rights when it comes to library collections (that ruling hinged heavily on a decision in the Fifth Circuit from May, stating that library books are government speech and thus, not subject to the Free Speech clause).
• This contradicted a decision made just weeks before, in which a judge found a Florida law used to remove books from public schools to be “overbroad and unconstitutional.”
• Additionally, a ruling in late September from a US District Judge in Ohio stated that public school educators don’t have First Amendment Rights when it comes to the books stocked in their classrooms, either.

Another recent win : US District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles ruled in E.K. v. Department of Defense Education Activity that the 600 books banned in military schools by the Department of Defense were a violation of Constitutional rights and that they must be returned to the schools of those involved in the lawsuit. – KJ

🚫 Sign up for our Literary Activism newsletter for more news, tips, and tools in the fight against censorship.

🥳 Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Partypooper celebrates the 20th book in Jeff Kinney’s bestselling series with another hilarious look at Greg Heffley’s misadventures.

Packed with humor , heart, and the relatable chaos of growing up, this milestone release reminds readers why Wimpy Kid continues to be a global favorite. Kinney once again delivers the perfect mix of comedy and charm that keeps fans coming back year after year.

For more than 50 years, Geek Love, Katherine Dunn’s strange and endearing story of a family of circus “freaks,” has had something like a cult following. With more than 400,000 copies sold to date, though, it’s become more than an underground darling.

I spoke with Naomi Huffman, editor of a new collection of Katherine Dunn’s work, Near Flesh, about the enduring appeal of Geek Love, and I thought this section of our conversation captured why so many, including myself, count it as one of our books:

" I think some of the resonance of that book has to do with the era in which it was released. The book came out in 1989, but it gained a readership throughout the early nineties, and that was a readership that really cared about the punk spirit, the DIY ethos. In fact, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love were known fans of her work, particularly of Geek Love. 


There’s this spirit in the book, too. To live life on your own terms. To celebrate yourself for who you are at your core, to not conceal the parts of your outer appearance or your interiority that don’t necessarily translate beautifully to most people. I think that’s an enduring lesson to take from her and her work. People continue to build a strong bond with the book, to return to it over and over. I have read it many times. I’m certainly not the only person I know who has read it many times. You’re drawn back to it for that very humanist perspective of hers, that central lesson of living life on your own terms of being the freak that you wanna be." 


Near Flesh, Henderson says, is the most complete collection of Dunn’s work to date with a range one might expect Dunn: “For instance, there is a retelling of a fairytale in the collection, and there’s also a very futuristic story that is set among robots, which feels remarkably prescient, where a woman is basically engaged in a series of relationships with different robots.”

Near Flesh is out now from MCD. 

Rediscovering a classic work is perhaps the greatest use of any new adaptation. And something like Hedda, directed by Nina daCosta and starring Tessa Thompson, exists on a continuum of many, many, adaptations of Henrik Ibsen’s titanic 1891 play, so by its very nature, it is also about adaptation itself. There are already so many versions of Hedda Gabler that there is freedom, as you are unlikely to do much for (or to) the original’s reputation.

And there is a reason so many want a crack at Hedda. Maggie Smith, Cate Blanchett, Rosamund Pike, and many others have played the character sometimes called “the female Hamlet,” a moniker that both elevates the role and boxes it in. 

The play was the last in Henrik Ibsen’s realist plays–after Hedda , his few remaining plays would be more abstract and symbolic in nature–and the reality it portrayed stunned and confused the theatrical world at the time and has beguiled audiences ever since.

Hedda is complex . She is mysterious. She has desires that neither she nor the audience ever gets a solid grasp on. But her allure is not just that she escapes our understanding, but that she is self-conscious about her own unarticulated depths. She shares this quality with Hamlet and another perhaps more telling one: she is so adept at performance (as wife, lover, society woman) that the idea of performance itself is in play. 

As director Nina DaCosta says of her adaptation, Hedda “finds it impossible [to deal with] what she sees in other people, which is everyone lying and pretending, even though she’s the best pretender of them all.” 

🍿 Hedda is in theaters now and will hit Amazon Prime tomorrow, October 29.

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Books can’t be your whole personality. OG Book Riot contributor Greg Zimmerman works for a literary nonprofit in Chicago and moonlights as an independent bookseller. When he’s not reading and writing, he’s training for marathons. (No, we don’t know how he does it, either.)

After completing the 2025 Chicago Marathon, Greg reflected on the many ways that reading is like running. Here are some highlights:

🧠 Both are anxiety busters. In Michael Clune’s Pan , a character suffering from anxiety stays up all night immersed in reading a book because as long as he’s reading, his mind is occupied and not free to roam and catastrophize. I’ve never read something that so closely matches my experience for one of the reasons I love reading. And running is the same—not only does it keep my mind occupied in the moment, but also it keeps me focused on a goal, which for me, helps reduce anxiety.

💪 Both can bring about an intense feeling of well-being. Yes, the “runner’s high” is REAL, but it is honestly pretty rare. When it happens though, it’s intense—a feeling of euphoria like nothing can hurt you and nothing can ever go wrong again. Similarly, when you’re reading something really good, and you’re in the flow state, and you suddenly forget you have a body, and you are so connected to the page, it’s as if you’ve stepped outside yourself. That feels amazing, too!

🤝 Both lead to life-changing friendships. I have not found two more close-knit, supportive communities than the running and reading communities. I have met people I never would’ve without these hobbies—people who are now close friends. I really, really love that about these two things.

👟 Read on for 5 more similarities at The New Dork Review of Books.

🎁 Start stocking up on stocking stuffers. Get a free gift with any $30 or more Sephora order with code RARECOMFORT.**

🍁 Snuggle up with 10 fall books that feel like a hug.

🏆 See the finalists for Barnes & Noble’s Book of the Year, which is indeed different from its list of Best Books of the Year.

🎃 Pick your winners in a horror books bracket.

🐳 Learn the unbelievable real name of the whale that inspired Moby-Dick .

_{**This is a product recommendation from the Book Riot team. When you buy through these links, we may earn a commission.}

Written by Rebecca Schinsky, Jeff O’Neal, and Kelly Jensen. Thanks to Danika Ellis for copy editing.

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