Penguin Random House, author portrait placeholder image

Jenny Slate

Jenny Slate is a writer, comedian, and actress. She and Dean Fleischer-Camp created the short film Marcel the Shell with Shoes On in the late summer of 2010. It screened at film festivals all over the world, including Sundance and the New York International Children's Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury and Audience Awards. It subsequently became a viral sensation, garnering more than 20 million views on YouTube. Their first picture book, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On: Things About Me, was a New York Times bestseller. Slate has appeared in numerous films and TV programs, including Obvious Child, Saturday Night Live, Parks and Recreation, and Zootopia.

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 291 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