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

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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

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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

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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?

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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FROM THE PAGE: An excerpt from Gerd Gigerenzer’s How to Stay Smart in a Smart World

How to stay in charge in a world populated by algorithms that beat us in chess, find us romantic partners, and tell us to “turn right in 500 yards.”   Technological solutionism is the belief that every societal problem is a “bug” that needs a “fix” through an algorithm. Technological paternalism is its natural consequence,

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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

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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

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Community Reads and All-School Reads: Young Adult Adaptations and Young Readers’ Editions

As we approach August, school and community leaders are looking for ways to set the tone for a new school year. Each community will have its own expectations to set, academic priorities to spotlight, or values to align on, but no matter what the focus or growth area, a community read or all school read

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Spotlight on The Magic Fish: NYPL Books for All Pick

Featured in New York Public Library’s “Books for All” nation-wide community reading program, The Magic Fish is “a lyrical masterpiece” (BuzzFeed) from “a gifted storyteller” (The New York Times) that has received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books. In this award-winning graphic novel, one

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