U.S. News & World Report, which publishes the most widely quoted annual set of rankings for American colleges and universities, recently shared their list of “10 Books to Read Before College.” Describing these books as “assigned texts [that] are regularly used in freshman-level classes and offer students a chance to come together to discuss a

Contributed by Katharine K. Wilkinson, co-editor of All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis “I was shaking as I read the opening essay because I felt so empowered,” one of my students shared at the start of the fall 2020 semester. I’d spent the previous nine months co-editing the bestselling

Editor John Freeman reflects on his journey with the world of short stories in light of the upcoming release of The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story.  Click here  to see the full Table of Contents for The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story.   The Penguin Book of the Modern

  Left: Robin Broad; right: John Cavanagh   In the early 2000s, many people in El Salvador were at first excited by the prospect of jobs, progress, and prosperity that the Pacific Rim mining company promised. However, farmer Vidalina Morales, brothers Marcelo and Miguel Rivera, and others soon discovered that the river system supplying water

In How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill Gates shares what he’s learned in more than a decade of studying climate change and sets out a vision for how the world can build the tools it needs to get to zero greenhouse gas emissions.   Bill Gates explains what needs to be done to make

Contributed by Kate Manne, author of Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women CW: This post contains descriptions of misogynistic and sexual violence On Friday May 23, 2014, I was an assistant professor just finishing up my first year of teaching at Cornell University. Scrolling through my Facebook feed, I saw reports of a horrible crime

Founded in 1994, Riverhead Books publishes bestselling literary fiction and quality nonfiction. Throughout its history, Riverhead has been dedicated to publishing extraordinary groundbreaking, unique writers including Danielle Evans, Danzy Senna, and James McBride. Collected here are some works from Black writers published by Riverhead. Their stories articulate the Black experience in America and give voice

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

Colson Whitehead has won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, The Nickel Boys. This is his second Pulitzer Prize (his novel The Underground Railroad won in 2017) and he is only the fourth writer—alongside Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and John Updike—to win two Pulitzer Prizes each in the Fiction category. Winner, ALA Alex Award Winner,

Contributed by David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth Climate change is not a single subject, or a single story, but the theater in which all human life is now conducted, transforming and reordering nearly every aspect of modern life—our infrastructure and our migration patterns, our cities and our energy systems and our agriculture, our

We are delighted to present our new First-Year reading catalogs for 2020! From award-winning fiction and memoir to new books about science, technology, history and current events, the titles presented in our college reading catalogs will have students not only eagerly flipping through the pages, but also excited for the chance to discuss their reading