Break out that stamp collection! Make letter-writing your 2026 bag (it is my forever bag)! The United States Postal Service is commemorating poet Phillis Wheatley with a stamp.

Wheatley becomes the 49th honoree in USPS’s Black Heritage stamp series, which includes author and MacArthur Foundation fellow Ernest J. Gaines and playwright August Wilson. Wheatley was the first African American woman to publish a volume of poetry in America . USPS dedicating official Chenise LeDoux, speaking on Wheatley’s honor, said, “She not only challenged prevailing assumptions about race, intellect and artistic ability during the Colonial period, she sought to remind the young nation that the ‘Goddess of Liberty’ should belong to everyone, regardless of the color of their skin.”

I first learned of Wheatley through the YA historical fiction novel, Hang a Thousand Trees With Ribbons , gifted to me in my teens by a family friend who knew I loved writing, but The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is one of the seminal works about this literary legend if you’re looking to learn more about the poet. - SZW

At the top of our list this week is Language as Liberation, a collection of Toni Morrison’s essays about the Black canon. And for something completely different, there’s Superfan by National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree Jenny Tinghui Zhang, which explores fandom, loneliness, and the dark side of going deep.

Also hitting shelves:

• A debut novel about an Afghan American family in the aftermath of their teen daughter’s death, with blurbs from a who’s-who of literary heavy hitters
• A chronicle of Bernie Sanders’s political career by a poet and critic
• A getting-the-gang-back-together novel about five women who became friends in college and reunite for a trip to Palm Springs

🔓 Join All Access to unlock our jam-packed New Release Index and track your most anticipated releases.

For fantasy lovers who prefer their power earned and their feelings complicated.

The Knight and Her Emperor is the fantasy manhwa adaptation of G.M.’s hit webnovel, now available in English print for the first time. When a gifted but overlooked female knight allies herself with an ambitious young king, the two set out to unite a fractured empire and defy expectations, politics, and their own carefully guarded hearts.

Perfect for fans of Tamora Pierce, Naomi Novik, and the enduring Lady Knight trend, this first volume collects episodes 1-18 of the webcomic, delivering rich worldbuilding, character-driven tension, and a romance that simmers rather than rushes.

Regularly listed among the greatest American novels and widely considered to be James Baldwin’s highest accomplishment, Go Tell It on the Mountain is a vivid and riveting story about a teenage boy reckoning with life’s biggest questions.

Largely based on Baldwin’s own early life, the novel, set in Harlem in the mid-1930s, depicts a Black boy coming of age, coming to consciousness, and wrestling with faith, sexuality, and a brutal family legacy. It’s as urgent and compelling today as it was at its original publication in 1953, and it just might be the best debut novel in the modern American canon.

🎧 Learn more about this essential work of American fiction on this week’s episode of Zero to Well-Read.

Last week’s Publishing for Minnesota auction raised more than $215,000 for on-the-ground organizations resisting the cruel and inhumane actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). While the auction has ended, there are still meaningful ways to support protest and relief efforts through bookish means:

• 📚 Donate books to families: A Book of My Own is collecting monetary donations through January and February to create curated book collections for Minneapolis families.
• 📖 Support children and schools: Red Balloon Bookshop is running book drives for Community Aid Network Minnesota and local schools. Purchase a book for donation using code CANMN20 (Spanish-language titles especially needed), or make a monetary contribution.
• 🏪 Shop indie, shop local: Support Twin Cities bookstores that invest in their communities, including Birchbark Books, Big Hill Books, Moon Palace Books, Black Garnet Books, and Dreamhaven Books. Pair purchases with donations via Stand With Minnesota. Pair your book purchase with a donation to a local Minneapolis organization, which you can find through Stand With Minnesota. 
• 🏫 Fund classrooms directly : DonorsChoose lets you support educators requesting supplies across Minneapolis. Use the map to find schools and projects in greatest need.

This is yet another moment in American history where we need to pause and remember what we owe each other not only as residents on colonized territory but what we owe each other as humans. Find more ideas for literary activism in the Twin Cities here. -KJ

Every page counts. ThriftBooks’s 500 Billion Page Challenge is a long-term initiative designed to help you make reading a sustainable, everyday habit again. Instead of chasing big, time-intensive goals, the challenge reframes progress one page at a time because those small moments add up.

By tracking all participants’ cumulative pages read, the challenge turns individual reading into a shared effort, reminding us that every page contributes to something bigger. Reintroduced this year, the 500 Billion Page Challenge is an invitation to reset, slow down, and remember that showing up for even one page today is real progress. Join the challenge today!

For neurodivergent readers, small moments of accommodation and understanding can feel just as powerful as grand gestures. These romance subtropes make neurodivergent readers feel seen and understood:

🎧 Support Without Fixing: Knowing When Their Partner Is Overstimulated

❤️ Gentle Communication: Rejection Sensitivity

➡️ Patient Pacing: Transitions

💕 Low Demand Love: Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Here are a few books where you can see these subtropes in action, expressed through how the characters show up for each other on the page:

• Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert
• What Is Love? by Jen Comfort
• The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang
• The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun
• A Duke by Default by Alyssa Cole

For more about these tropes and more books with neurodivergent love on the page, check out Romance Tropes for Neurodivergent Readers. — Nikki DeMarco

Scott Eden is the author of A Killing in Cannabis: A True Story of Love, Murder, and California Weed , out now from Spiegel & Grau. Here are the weirdest things that happened while researching the book.

I was sitting at the bar of my hotel in Santa Cruz, California, after a long day of reporting, when my phone buzzed. It was a text from a source over Signal, the encrypted messaging app favored by drug dealers, spies, investigative reporters, and paranoid people the world over.  

“A guy named Frank turned up dead at the hotel I was staying at," the message warned, a little breathlessly. “Heard a rumor he was meeting you.”

While reporting on the world of California weed for A Killing in Cannabis, my experiences were, not infrequently...weird.  This was probably to be expected. Despite legalization, the black market still thrived, and many, if not all, licensed weed businesspeople were still active on the illegal side of the business. Many weed entrepreneurs were former full-time black marketeers.

There was, without doubt, an ancient tradition of omertà, and secrecy, and distrust of outsiders, and a kind of mystic spookiness that fit right in with the foggy redwood mountainsides and the old hippie spirituality of the place.   

Don’t get me wrong. Many of the people I met in the weed trade were kind, generous, honest, and more than happy to regale me with tales about their adventurous lives. But their stories were also saturated with paranoia.

I heard any number of madcap allegations, including the one about poor Frank. (I never spoke to anyone named Frank for the book; no dead bodies were discovered at the hotel that day or any day.)

Or the one about the mysterious, powerful Santa Cruz drug-trafficking families who controlled local law enforcement.

Or that the murder victim at the center of the book’s story—a legal cannabis startup founder named Tushar Atre—had become a serial snitch, informing to police on all the other licensed cannabis business owners who were also dabbling in the black market. (I never unearthed any evidence to support either of those accusations.)

Or that Atre had gotten himself in debt to a Mexican drug cartel. (Read the book to learn more about that one!) 

In the book, I quote William S. Burroughs, the famed writer and outlaw, who once told an interviewer: “A paranoid might be defined as someone who has some idea as to what is actually going on.” It could have been the book’s epigraph. 

Level up your reading life with Book Riot All Access! Unlock the industry’s best deep dives, join in with community features, and conquer the Read Harder Challenge alongside fellow bibliophiles. Start with a gift on us: The first 100 new annual members get a FREE copy of Lady Tremaine by Rachel Hochhauser. Experience the "evil" stepmother’s side of the story in this breathtaking feminist reimagining of Cinderella. Don’t miss your chance to grab this stunning debut and gain year-round access to the best of Book Riot. Join All Access today!

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🕵️ Loved Wake Up Dead Man ? Read these mysteries next.

🔥 Feel the (slow) burn with these juicy enemies-to-lovers romances.

📖 300 million books later, Wimpy Kid author Jeff Kinney still has no plans to slow down.

😱 Get your fright fix with the shortlist for this year’s Bram Stoker awards.

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