Penguin Random House, author portrait placeholder image

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Thomas Chatterton Williams holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Georgetown University and a master's degree from the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. In 2007, he wrote an op-ed piece entitled "Yes, Blame Hip-Hop" for the Washington Post, which generated a record-breaking number of comments. He writes for the literary magazine n+1 and currently lives in Brooklyn.
Losing My Cool

Books

Losing My Cool

What Students Will Be Reading: Campus Common Reading Roundup, 2025-26

With the fall semester in full swing, colleges and universities around the country have announced their Common Reading books for the upcoming 2025-26 academic year. We’ve compiled a list of over 284 programs and their title selections from publicly available sources, which you can download here: First-Year Reading 2025-26. We will continue to update this

Read more

2026 Catalog for First-Year & Common Reading

We are delighted to present our new First-Year & Common Reading Catalog for 2026! From award-winning fiction, poetry, memoir, and biography to new books about the environment, current events, history, public health, science, social justice, student success, and technology, the titles presented in our common reading catalog will have students not only eagerly flipping through

Read more