Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University Anthony Reed remembers William Melvin Kelley.   William Melvin Kelley is often described as a “lost” or “forgotten” author. Those who needed to know about him have always had a way of finding him. As a young writer, interested in fiction and poetry, I knew a lot about

By Martin J. Sherwin The Cuban Missile Crisis ended peacefully because neither President John Kennedy nor Premier Nikita Khrushchev wanted a war. It ended peacefully because Fidel Castro frightened Khrushchev into believing that the United States was about to start a war. It ended without a war because America’s ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai

Beaten Down, Worked Up is a stirring and essential look at labor in America, poised as it is between the tumultuous struggles of the past and the vital, hopeful struggles ahead.    Beaten Down, Worked Up Award-winning journalist and author Steven Greenhouse guides us through the key episodes and trends in history that are essential

Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi’s stunning follow-up to her award-winning novel Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered story about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.   Transcendent Kingdom Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and

J. Gerald Kennedy is Boyd Professor of English Emeritus at Louisiana State University and a past president of the Poe Studies Association. Editor of the Penguin Classic The Portable Edgar Allan Poe, here he makes a case for Poe’s continued relevancy, 200 years after he was originally published. Why read Poe? And why now? For

Because what you read matters. Subscribe to the Penguin Classics Newsletter here. Black Lives Matter. Black Voices Matter. Black Stories Matter. This month we’re sharing a few of the works by Black authors we have been learning from lately. Let us know on social media the Black voices and stories you’re reading this month (we’re @PenguinClassics everywhere). Nonfiction—History: The

A Burning is a novel about three unforgettable characters who seek to rise—to the middle class, to political power, to fame in the movies—and find their lives entangled in the wake of a catastrophe in contemporary India. Jivan is a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, who is accused of

Activist Alice Wong presents a galvanizing collection of thirty-seven essays by disabled people just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century celebrates and documents disability culture in the now. From Harriet McBryde Johnson’s account of her debate with Peter Singer over her

Because what you read matters. Subscribe to the Penguin Classics Newsletter here. It’s  officially summer, and as we continue to social distance, stay home, and thank essential and frontline workers through these months, we share new Penguin Classics that we hope will offer you an escape, transport you around the world, and keep you company. Read

Bryan Washington has been named the 2020 Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize winner for his story collection LOT. In LOT, Washington explores his hometown of Houston—a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America—where the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He’s working at his family’s restaurant, weathering his brother’s blows,

Because what you read matters. Subscribe to the Penguin Classics Newsletter here. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Presented here are some

Bren Smith, author of Eat Like a Fish: My Adventures Farming the Ocean to Fight Climate Change and Executive Director of Greenwave gives an inside view of the process of ocean farming and its potential to save the planet in two informative videos. In “This Incredible underwater farm could be the future of food” produced