Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi’s stunning follow-up to her award-winning novel Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered story about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.   Transcendent Kingdom Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and

 Penguin Random House Author Events at the 39th Annual First-Year Experience® Conference Washington, D.C., February 21-24, 2020 Click Here to RSVP Interested in hosting one of these authors at your school? Click their name below to learn more! Ibram X. Kendi Jennifer L. Eberhardt Nic Stone Bina Venkataraman Bren Smith

By the time he was twenty-seven, Kwame Onwuachi had competed on Top Chef, cooked at the White House, and opened and closed one of the most talked about restaurants in America. Despite his young age, his success wasn’t won overnight: working in Manhattan, he was forced to grapple with just how unwelcoming the world of

On February 9, 2018, the Penguin Random House First-Year Reading Advisory Board convened for their annual summit the day before The First-Year Experience® Conference exhibit and sessions commenced. The Board members, representing a variety of public and private higher education institutions of varying sizes, came together to exchange ideas, and provide feedback and guidance. Our seven board members, along with staff

The following letter was contributed by Christian Coleman, Digital Marketing Associate at Beacon Press.  We live in a time where a president makes barefaced remarks in speeches that African Americans and Latinx people are prone to violence and corruption. His statements, obviously, pay no respect to the centuries-long history of African Americans and Latinx people organizing together

Tom Barrett, Mayor of Milwaukee, read Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which tells the story of eight impoverished families in his city who are threatened with forced eviction. Influenced by this multi-award-winning book, Barrett is launching an ambitious housing project to build or renovate 10,000 housing units in Milwaukee over the next

Did we steal or borrow the idea of common reading? A publisher and long-term believer in the power of the book to connect communities, it was at an academic conference in Boston in 2006 that I spotted a paper on the practice of ‘common reading’. What a great idea I thought, and I pondered long

A message from Shawn Achor: My parents are educators of first-year students. My father taught freshman Introduction to Psychology for 39 years at Baylor. My mom taught freshman English for 30 years. And I spent eight years as a first-year proctor at Harvard, where my job was to counsel freshmen students through their transition. Long

My name is Nadia Murad. I am Yazidi, a member of a small, monotheistic religious community whose holy temples and homelands are located in northern Iraq. Early in the morning of August 3, 2014, militants with the Islamic State attacked Kocho, my small village, and from that moment on my life—as well as the lives

Passage is the story of a young man’s journey. Warrior, the protagonist, is surrounded by deep family love and a sustaining connection to his history—connections that arm him as he confronts both spiritual and human forces that seek his destruction. It is, in part, an allegory, and a poetic narrative that allows you to experience

With the fall semester just weeks away, colleges and universities around the country have announced their Common Reading books for the upcoming 2017-18 academic year.  We’ve compiled a list of over 440 programs and their title selections, which you can download here: First-Year Reading 2017-18. We will continue to update this listing to provide the most comprehensive

Across the political spectrum, people agree on one point and one point only: our public sphere is a great big mess. Mistrust of our neighbors, anger at their folly, inadvertent or deliberate misunderstanding of their views, attribution of the worst possible motives to those whose politics we despise: these are the dissonant notes we hear