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, which you can download here: First-Year Reading 2024-25. We will continue to update this listing to provide the

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,

We’re pleased to share videos from the 2025 First-Year Experience® Conference. Whether you weren’t able to join us at the conference or would simply like to hear the talks again, please take a moment to view the clips below.   Penguin Random House Author Breakfast Monday, February 17th, 7:15 – 8:45 am PST This event

2024 recipient of the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language given by the National Council of Teachers of English   Making Americans is a landmark work that weaves captivating stories about the past, present, and personal into an inspiring vision for how America can educate immigrant students. Setting

As the sponsor for the 2024-2025 Outstanding First Year Student Advocate Awards, we at Penguin Random House Education are proud to foster a universal passion for reading and to honor an extraordinary group of educators for their commitment to student learning. On February 18th, at the 2025 First-Year Experience® Conference in New Orleans, LA, we

Contributed by Ferris Jabr, author of Becoming Earth: A Journey Through the Hidden Wonders that Bring Our Planet to Life, an exhilarating guide to the workings of our planetary symphony—its players, its instruments, and the music of life that emerges—and an invitation to reexamine our place in it.  For more than two centuries, Western science

In Original Sins, University of Chicago professor Eve L. Ewing demonstrates that it’s in the DNA of American schools to serve as an effective and under acknowledged mechanism maintaining inequality in this country today. Ewing makes the case that we need a profound reevaluation of what schools are supposed to do, and for whom. This

PRH Education/Common Reads presents: unCommon Authors unCommon Authors is a monthly video series highlighting exceptional and unique authors talking about their books.   The bestselling author of Your Inner Fish takes readers on an epic adventure to the North and South Poles to reveal the secrets locked in the ice about life, the cosmos, and our planet’s future.

One of America’s greatest storytellers sheds light on an American tragedy: the Wounded Knee Massacre, and the ‘cultural genocide’ experienced by the Native American children at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. In September of 1890, the academic year begins at the Carlisle School, a military-style boarding school for Indians in Pennsylvania, founded and run by

Contributed by Catherine Price, health and science journalist and author of How to Break Up with Your Phone, Revised Edition: The 30-Day Digital Detox Plan. Now fully revised and updated, with expanded chapters explaining how social media and algorithms are designed to addict us and an updated section on the unique dangers social media poses

How the World Really Works is an essential analysis of the modern science and technology that makes our twenty-first century lives possible—a scientist’s investigation into what science really does, and does not, accomplish. This book explains seven of the most fundamental realities governing our survival and prosperity. From energy and food production, through our material

Talk is a groundbreaking book that reveals the hidden architecture of our conversations and how even small improvements can have a profound impact on our relationships in work and life—from a celebrated Harvard Business School professor and leading expert on the psychology of conversation. Click here to access a complimentary workbork for Talk, created by the

PRH Education/Common Reads presents: unCommon Authors unCommon Authors is a monthly video series highlighting exceptional and unique authors talking about their books.   As the first medical director and attending psychiatrist at the World Trade Center Mental Health Program, Dr. Sue Varma worked directly with civilian and first-responder survivors in the aftermath of 9/11. There,

In October 2024, Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption celebrated its 10th anniversary. A new edition of the book is now available, featuring a new prologue. Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the