Penguin Random House, author portrait placeholder image

John H. Ritter

John H. Ritter has written many books and numerous short stories for young readers. His first novel, Choosing Up Sides, won the 1999 International Reading Association Children’s Book Award for Older Readers and was designated an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults. In 2004, Ritter received the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People for his third novel, The Boy Who Saved Baseball. He is also the author of Over the Wall, Fenway Fever, The Desperado Who Stole Baseball, and Under the Baseball Moon. John lives with his wife, Cheryl, in Hawaii.

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