Do You Teach History?

Kabul-born novelist Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, is known for his evocative storytelling deeply rooted in Afghanistan’s history and culture. Like so many of us, he watched Afghanistan fall to the Taliban with profound sadness. In the wake of these events, Penguin Random House has updated the educator’s guides for Hosseini’s

Last week, the MIT Press published A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See by Tina Campt, examining the work of contemporary Black artists who are dismantling the white gaze and demanding that we see—and see Blackness in particular—anew. Campt shows that this new way of seeing shifts viewers from the passive optics of “looking at”

Ben Ehrenreich is being awarded the American Book Award for Desert Notebooks, which examines how the unprecedented pace of destruction to our environment and an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape have led us to the brink of a calamity greater than any humankind has confronted before. Ehrenreich draws on the stark grandeur of the desert to ask

Carolyn Forché is being awarded the American Book Award for In the Lateness of the World, a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination

Because what you read matters.   Subscribe to the Penguin Classics Newsletter here.   As summer starts coming to a (very hot) close, we’ve rounded up a few classics that are short enough to read in a month, but memorable enough to end your summer reading on a high note. From savvy stream-of-consciousness writing to gripping

  An inconvenient truth lies beneath the promises of opportunity and prestige that higher education degrees offer. US academic institutions are built upon legacies of stolen labor on stolen land. Through history, this settler-colonial foundation has trapped us in history and perpetuated race, class, and gender inequalities on campus. Social protests, often led by youth,

Q: What is a life transition and why are they important right now?   A: At its simplest, a life transition is the way humans cope with periods of change. When we get hit by a major life disruption, or lifequake as I call these times, we often freeze with indecision and fear. The life

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

Because what you read matters.   Subscribe to the Penguin Classics Newsletter here.   Happy summer from Penguin Classics! With warmer weather, outdoor activities, and long-awaited reunions on the horizon, we’re feeling hopeful for a brighter season. We wish you your ideal restorative break with books, whether you finally bring your book club outdoors or your

Cubans today, most of whom have lived their entire lives under the Castro regime, are hesitantly embracing the future. In his new book, THE CUBANS, Anthony DePalma, a veteran reporter with years of experience in Cuba, focuses on a neighborhood across the harbor from Old Havana to dramatize the optimism as well as the enormous

In June we celebrate Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ+) Pride Month, which honors the 1969 Stonewall riots in Manhattan. First, President Bill Clinton declared June “Gay & Lesbian Pride Month” on June 2, 2000. In 2009, President Barack Obama declared June “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month.” LGBTQ+ Pride events attract millions

By Scott Ellsworth   What if one’s history wasn’t what it was supposed to be? On the block where I grew up, families rarely locked their doors, children played outside until well past dark on warm summer evenings, and history, in the form of the kinds of things that appeared on the nightly news, was