The Book News We Covered This Week

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. Here are the stories we covered ourselves on Book Riot this week.

It’s been a quiet couple of holiday weeks for us, so I’m doing things differently for our first Sunday roundup of the year and offering a smörgåsbord of interesting stories from the world of books and publishing. If you, like me, were too busy making more baked goods than you could ever hope to eat to consume online content, this one’s for.

And if you like this sort of thing, become a member of All Access to stay in the know beyond what we’re able to cover each week.

• Barnes & Noble to open 60 stores in 2026. See new locations.
• TCM Sets Full Evening of Programming to Honor Rob Reiner, Including Network Premiere of ‘The Princess Bride’
• ‘Heated Rivalry’ Stars Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams to Narrate Erotic Romantasy Series for Quinn: Exclusive Photos
• Readers’ Most Anticipated Romantasies for 2026
• Oyinkan Braithwaite Would (Nervously) Invite Charlotte Brontë to Dinner
• Heated Rivalry and the Big Business of Hockey Romance Novels
• Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben on their new novel, ‘Gone Before Goodbye’
• Sumptuous New Historical Fiction
• 25 Books Coming in January
• Nonfiction and Y.A. are hurting, but genre fiction and the Good Book are booming. Here’s how book sales looked in 2025.
• Genre fiction and female authors top U.S. libraries’ most-borrowed lists in 2025

• Mass-market books are disappearing from grocery store racks
• ‘It’s no romcom’: why the real Wuthering Heights is too extreme for the screen
• 28 Book Industry Professionals Get Candid About the State of the Industry
• The books to look out for in 2026