Penguin Random House, author portrait placeholder image

Melanie Challenger

Melanie Challenger works as a researcher on the history of humanity and the natural world, and on environmental philosophy. She is the author of On ExtinctionHow We Became Estranged from Nature. She received a Darwin Now Award for her research among Canadian Inuit and the Arts Council International Fellowship with the British Antarctic Survey for her work on the history of whaling. She lives with her family in England. Challenger is the host of the  “Enter the Psychosphere” podcast, where she dives into the world of the diverse intelligences that exist on the planet in conversations with guests like Peter Godfrey Smith and Daniel Dennett.
How to Be Animal

Books

How to Be Animal

What Students Will Be Reading: Campus Common Reading Roundup, 2024-25

With the fall semester in full swing, colleges and universities around the country have announced their Common Reading books for the upcoming 2024-25 academic year. We’ve compiled a list of over 340 programs and their title selections from publicly available sources, which you can download here: First-Year Reading 2024-25. We will continue to update this

Read more

2025 Catalog for First-Year & Common Reading

We are delighted to present our new First-Year & Common Reading Catalog for 2025! From award-winning fiction, poetry, memoir, and biography to new books about science, technology, history, student success, the environment, public health, and current events, the titles presented in our common reading catalog will have students not only eagerly flipping through the pages,

Read more