By Emily Esfahani Smith, author of The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life That Matters (Crown, January 2017) When I was a senior in high school, I thought I knew what I wanted to do with my life: I was going to be a doctor. I loved science, and easing the suffering of others, I

By Wayne Maines, father of Nicole Maines.  The Maines family is the focus of Amy Ellis Nutt’s Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family (Random House, October 2015) Recently I had the opportunity to speak at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine. Before the lecture I spent an hour walking around their beautiful campus, thinking

By Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown, March 2016) I began this project because I wanted to write a different kind of book about poverty in America. Instead of focusing exclusively on poor people or poor places, I began searching for a process that involved poor and well-off

Welcome to the new Common Reads website!  Featuring a highly-curated list of titles from across all publishing divisions of Penguin Random House, this site was created and designed to help you find the right book and the right resources for your school reading program. Whether you are an educator or a librarian looking for an

Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She’s Not There, Stuck in the Middle With You and I’m Looking Through You, will continue her book tour on October 15th with an appearance at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.  Boylan will give the 10th Annual Eleanor Roosevelt Lecture for the Women and Gender Studies program.  She has previously

In August, Téa Obreht was honored as this year’s Marino Family International Writers’ Academic Workshop author at Georgetown University. The Marino Family International Writers’ Academic Workshop has been taking place at Georgetown since 1995 and has featured authors such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Margaret Atwood, Dinaw Mengestu (a Georgetown alumnus), and Orhan Pamuk. The Workshop

Abandoned at age 15, Sam Bracken battled homelessness, poverty, and abuse to successfully earn a full-ride football scholarship to the Georgia Institute of Technology. When he left for college, everything he owned fit in an orange duffel bag. Now, in this illustrated memoir and road map to personal transformation, Sam shares his story as well as