Harry Potter, The Boy Who Lived… forever on the bestsellers list.  Nearly 20 years after its first release, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” (Scholastic Inc., 576 pp.), the fifth novel in J.K. Rowling’s children’s fantasy series, originally released in 2003, tops USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list as a special illustrated edition with art by Jim Kay with Neil Packer.

This comes a little over a month after Rowling’s “The Ink Black Heart” (Mulholland Books, 1,024 pp.), the latest installment of Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series written under the pen name Robert Galbraith, hit No. 3 on the list in its debut week.

Rowling’s bestsellers come in the midst of ongoing controversy for the author which began in the summer of 2020, when Rowling tweeted numerous opinions on the trans community that conflated sex with gender and defended ideas suggesting that changing one’s biological sex threatens her own gender identity.

It’s a big week in books for “Harry Potter” luminaries: Also out this week are “Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman,” by the late actor beloved for playing Severus Snape in the film adaptations; and “Beyond the Wand: The Magic and Mayhem of Growing Up a Wizard,” by Tom Felton, who played Draco Malfoy and shares the harrowing details of his trip to rehab.
It also comes less than a week after the death of Scottish actor Robbie Coltrane, who played Hogwarts groundskeeper Rubeus Hagrid. “I’ll never know anyone remotely like Robbie again. He was an incredible talent, a complete one off, and I was beyond fortunate to know him, work with him and laugh my head off with him,” Rowling wrote on Twitter. “I send my love and deepest condolences to his family, above all his children.”