It’s slick and sexy. It’s wet and slimy. It’s hot and horny as hell. It’s cold and lacking chemistry. Critics might not agree on the new Wuthering Heights adaptation, but audiences have reached a consensus (I’m so sorry): it really spanks the competition.

Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie brooded, fought, and boinked their way to #1 with a $76 million global box office debut , and if the chatter in the ladies’ room after the screening I attended is any indication, many viewers will be going back for more. They’ll also be really confused when they pick up the book and discover that there’s nary a sex scene to be found, but that won’t be my fault.

• I’ll tell you what I told my new friends in the ladies’ room: if you’re looking for spicy, you won’t find it in the book.

Not sure you’re ready to saddle up? We break down the movie’s highs and lows, discuss who it’s for, and share our most unhinged notes on the Book Riot Podcast. - RJS

🇺🇸 America is having quite a year. The nation’s upcoming 250th birthday has occasioned a flood of both new books and re-releases of historic texts, and TBH, there’s never been a better time to have so many adult voices in the room.

This week’s highlights include a new edition of Walt Whitman’s On Democracy with an introduction from Yale English professor and literary historian David Bromwich alongside Jon Meacham’s American Struggle , an anthology of primary-source documents that explore America’s past in order to chart a way forward.

Also hitting shelves:

• 🪄 A fantasy for everyone who’s ever wished they could live inside a book
• 🖊️ An exploration of a Nobel Prize-winning American writer’s life and work
• 🎶 A rom-com about a woman trying to win back her ex with the help of her favorite musician
• 📣 Gisèle Pelicot’s powerful memoir about surviving assault, speaking out, and refusing to be ashamed.

📚 Bust your TBR with Book Riot’s New Release Index, available to All Access members.

What does it mean to truly live, not just survive?

Leigh Wilde has outlived everyone she loves. When a prison transport crash leaves her the sole survivor, she does what she’s always done: she keeps going.

In Where the Wildflowers Grow, Terah Shelton Harris (author of One Summer in Savannah and Long After We Are Gone ) delivers a sweeping Southern novel about grief, redemption, and a stubborn hope that refuses to die. A love story at its heart, this lyrical, atmospheric, and deeply felt novel also grapples with intergenerational trauma, incarceration, found family, and healing.

Don’t miss this thought-provoking, discussion-worthy novel that Annabel Monaghan calls “a masterpiece.”

Isabel Wilkerson is one of the best to ever do it. The Warmth of Other Suns , her landmark oral history of the Great Migration, is an essential read that goes over like an epic novel.

• Toni Morrison called it "profound, necessary, and an absolute delight to read."
• Critics—including some of us at Book Riot—voted it into the #2 spot on the New York Times list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.
• Wilkerson, herself a product of the Great Migration, was the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer for journalism.

Warmth is a big book in every sense, and it’s one we think every American should read. Hear our conversation about this groundbreaking work on Zero to Well-Read.

😱 Horror is for everyone. This year’s slate of Summer Scares books is officially here, ringing in eight years of selecting and promoting the best of the best in horror.

The selected titles for this year are:

• Adult: A Botanical Daughter by Noah Medlock, Never Whistle at Night edited by Shane Hawk & Theodore C. Van Alst, and Maeve Fly by CJ Leede.
• Young Adult: What We Harvest by Ann Fraistat, Gorgeous Gruesome Faces by Linda Cheng, and Our Shadows Have Claws edited by Yamile Saied Méndez & Amparo Ortiz.
• Middle Grade: Garlic and the Vampire by Bree Paulsen, It Came from the Trees by Ally Russell, and This Appearing House by Ally Malinenko.

Summer Scares aims to introduce horror titles to school and public library workers so they can start conversations with readers that extend beyond the books on each list and promote reading for years to come.

• The Summer Scares Programming Guide—free for any library to access—is back with the tools libraries need to connect with their patrons.
• The guide will be available beginning March 1, 2026 on the Summer Scares Resource page.
• You can also register to participate for free in Booklist’s series of webinars featuring panel discussions from the selected authors.

More information, including dates, times, and archived recordings, is available at Booklist. - KJ

🧠 Big Brain Energy Starts at 30% Off. Bloomsbury Academic’s February Flash Sale is here: get 30% off hardbacks and paperbacks and 40% off ebooks for one week only. From Shakespeare and cultural history to politics, pop culture, and beyond, it’s the moment to stock up on serious reads. You’ll also find essential works for Black History Month, spotlighting Black history, culture, and creativity.

Smart books, limited-time prices. Shop the February Flash Sale now.

Readers have had a few options in recent years for syncing ebook and audiobook reading, but adding a physical copy to the rotation has been clunky.

Spotify recently announced a Page Match feature in their app to fix that: use your phone camera to scan the page you’re reading, and it will sync up the audiobook to that spot.

When you’re ready to switch back, scan the page again and the Page Match feature will tell you how far to flip ahead to get to that exact passage. You can use this on ebooks or physical books.

Find out more about Page Match on Spotify’s For the Record blog.

Out today, On Morrison is an exploration of Toni Morrison’s work by award-winning novelist and Harvard professor Namwali Serpell. Below is an excerpt about how Morrison’s words live on.

Death, the failure of life itself, need not be the end of busy-ness. In a late interview, Morrison recalled a story her friend, the poet Lucille Clifton, had told her once about communing with her dead mother. One day, the ghost had said to Clifton: “Excuse me, I don’t want to talk any more—I have something to do.” The anecdote had delighted Morrison—beyond the grave, something to do!—and inspired her to inhabit the dead in her writing.

It also reminded her of a near-death experience she’d had years earlier: “I left my body and I was only eyes and mind, that’s all. I could think and I could see.” Morrison reported finding this unexpected adventure highly enticing: everything around “looked incredible”; she could move along the street, speed up and slow down. She knew she had to come back—“I had kids”—but she never forgot it: “Ooh, it was better than anything I’d ever felt. It was free, it was intelligent and I was in control. And the only other time that happens—those three things—is when I write.”

Beyond the bounds of life, where breath fails, perhaps language does not. We are cut off from Morrison’s presence now, but we still have her words, looping through time to us and circling around us. I like to imagine her this way still: over there, with something to do—busy writing, forever intelligent, in control, and free.

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🙋‍♀️ Can you guess the most popular books at Barnes & Noble right now?

💕 These romance books play with common romance tropes and subvert readers’ expectations.

📚 Read more short stories. Here are 12 collections to get you started.

👩 Bad moms make for good reading.

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