Penguin Random House, author portrait placeholder image

Robert DeMott

Robert DeMott, editor, is the Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University and author of Steinbeck's Typewriter, an award-winning book of critical essays.

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

NEA Big Read Introduces New Theme “Where We Live.” Applications Now Open.

In case you missed it, in October the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced new guidelines for its NEA Big Read initiative and the 2024-2025 theme “Where We Live” alongside 50 books available for selection, culled from its archive. Applications are now open for grants to support NEA Big Read projects between September 2024

Read more