Because what you read matters.   Subscribe to the Penguin Classics Newsletter here.   New year, new Classics! We truly can’t wait to share all the exciting titles we have coming this year, from new Penguin Vitaes to the Penguin Classics Marvel Collection to (of course) dozens of the black spines you know and love. Read on to discover the

Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine has been honored with the 2022 Phoenix Award, which encourages high standards of criticism, scholarship, research, and teaching in children’s literature. The only prize of its kind, the award recognizes a book of exceptional literary merit published twenty years prior that did not win a major award at the time

Because what you read matters.   Subscribe to the Penguin Classics Newsletter here.   Welcome to the annual Penguin Classics Holiday Gift Guide! Check out what our editors recommend for the different people in your world. And if you’d like to explore more, here’s our list of 75 recommended reads—some familiar and some surprising—to lead you

The 1619 Project is The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning reframing of American history that placed slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. The project, which was initially launched in August of 2019, offered a revealing new origin story for the United States, one that helped explain not only the persistence of

(November 2, 2021)—In honor of their 75th anniversary, Penguin Classics has partnered with #DisruptTexts, a renowned education organization that works to create a more inclusive, representative and equitable language arts curriculum for K-12 students. Facilitated by Penguin Random House (PRH) Education, this partnership includes a number of new initiatives focused on connecting with, and supporting,

October 20th is the National Day on Writing and we are celebrating writing in all its forms by sharing books that teach and influence students to become better writers and understand the value of writing in everyday life.   The Writer’s Practice The Writer’s Practice invites students and novice writers into an intellectually engaging, active

Because what you read matters.   Subscribe to the Penguin Classics Newsletter here.   Welcome to a spine-chilling season! October is one of our favorite months of the year at Penguin Classics, and we’re excited to dive into all things horrifying, creepy, and strange. Read on to see our top picks to get you into the

It was a long wait before Gayl Jones broke her years of silence. When Toni Morrison first discovered her, she said “no novel about any Black woman could ever be the same after this” upon reading the manuscript for Corregidora. It was published in 1975 when Jones was twenty-six. She followed up her debut novel with Eva’s

Written by By M. Leona Godin, author of There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness In William Melvin Kelley’s A Drop of Patience, we follow the life of a young Black musician named Ludlow Washington, who is placed in a school for the blind when he is five and remains there until

Because what you read matters.   Subscribe to the Penguin Classics Newsletter here.   Summer is officially fading like a sunset, and whether you’re back to school or back to your usual fall routine, we can guarantee there will be plenty of classics to keep you company. From our first Puerto Rican classic to a revelatory

By: Jess McHugh   Who gets to tell the American story?   That was the question that preoccupied me in the years of researching and writing Americanon. I was fascinated by the ways in which commonplace books, owned by millions of Americans—from almanacs to primers to cookbooks—shaped and reshaped American identity over generations of reading.

Thirty years ago, Carter addressed racism, colorism, classism, and sexism head on. Her books feel just as relevant today.   This essay by Caitlin Landuyt, editor, Vintage Books, was previously published on Crime Reads   Nanette Hayes, the Black jazz saxophonist/Francophile/reluctant crime solver of Charlotte Carter’s Rhode Island Red, Coq au Vin, and Drumsticks, blew into my life