FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Daniel Kelly’s Somebody Should Do Something

Changing the world is difficult. One reason is that the most important problems, like climate change, racism, and poverty, are structural. They emerge from our collective practices: laws, economies, history, culture, norms, and built environments. The dilemma is that there is no way to make structural change without individual people making different—more structure-facing—decisions. In Somebody Should Do Something,

Read more

FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Angus Fletcher’s Primal Intelligence

How are some people so much smarter than the rest of us? In 2021, researchers at Ohio State’s Project Narrative—renowned for collaborations with NASA, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley—announced they had the answer. They named it Primal Intelligence. It offers a new neuroscientific framework for understanding intuition, imagination, emotion, and commonsense—the four pillars of Primal Intelligence.

Read more

Register for the 2026 Penguin Random House First-Year Experience® Conference Author Events!

Penguin Random House Author Events at the 45th Annual First-Year Experience® Conference February 15-18, 2026 Seattle, Washington Hyatt Regency Seattle Click Here to RSVP A complimentary meal and a limited number of books will be available to attendees. Each event will also be followed by an author signing. Interested in hosting one of these authors at

Read more

unCommon Authors, an Author Video Series: A LIVING by Michael D. Stein

PRH Education/Common Reads presents: unCommon Authors unCommon Authors is a monthly video series highlighting exceptional and unique authors talking about their books. A Living is a vivid portrait of the working lives of the patients who visit Dr. Michael Stein, a primary care doctor in urban America. What makes his patients unique is that they, by

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

unCommon Authors, an Author Video Series: FREE AND EQUAL by Daniel Chandler

PRH Education/Common Reads presents: unCommon Authors unCommon Authors is a monthly video series highlighting exceptional and unique authors talking about their books.   Imagine: You are designing a society, but you don’t know who you’ll be within it—rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight. What would you want that society to look like?

Read more

FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Raymond Antrobus’s The Quiet Ear: An Investigation of Missing Sound

Raymond Antrobus was first diagnosed as deaf at the age of six. He discovered he had missing sounds—bird calls, whistles, kettles, alarms. Teachers thought he was slow and disruptive, some didn’t believe he was deaf at all. The Quiet Ear tells the story of Antrobus’s upbringing at the intersection of race and disability. Growing up in

Read more

FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Greg Grandin’s America, América: A New History of the New World

From Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Greg Grandin, America, América is the first comprehensive history of the Western Hemisphere. It offers a sweeping five-century narrative of North and South America that redefines our understanding of both.   1. Leaves of Grass Philosophy begins in wonder,” Socrates said. It matures, Hegel added, in terror, on the “slaughter bench” of history.

Read more

FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Calvin Duncan and Sophie Cull’s The Jailhouse Lawyer

A searing and ultimately hopeful account of Calvin Duncan, “the most extraordinary jailhouse lawyer of our time” (Sister Helen Prejean), and his thirty-year path through Angola after a wrongful murder conviction, his coming-of-age as a legal mind while imprisoned, and his continued advocacy for those on the inside.   Prologue “Whether I shall turn out

Read more

FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Adam Met’s Amplify

Amplify is a blueprint for boosting your activism and building support for the causes you care about, featuring fan-building tactics from the music industry and the voices of today’s most passionate change-makers.   Chapter 1 That Thing You Do What will you choose to take action on? We have to imagine this world we need

Read more

FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Ashley Cordes’s Indigenous Currencies

This book explores how Indigenous currencies—including wampum and dentalium shells, beads, and the cryptocurrency MazaCoin—have long constituted a form of resistance to settler colonialism.   “…[C]ryptocurrency, and digital currency broadly, continue creating shifting circuits of transactional culture. A sort of code rush is taking place, in which various digital forms of currency prevail over conventionally

Read more

unCommon Authors, an Author Video Series: BUILD THE LIFE YOU WANT by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey

PRH Education/Common Reads presents: unCommon Authors unCommon Authors is a monthly video series highlighting exceptional and unique authors talking about their books. In Build the Life You Want, Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey invite you to begin a journey toward greater happiness no matter how challenging your circumstances. Drawing on cutting-edge science and their years

Read more