Do You Teach Chemistry?

By David Laskin   After a long career successful in narrative nonfiction (The Children’s Blizzard, The Long Way Home, The Family), I decided a few years ago to jump the fence to fiction. My first novel, What Sammy Knew, is the story of a high school senior named Sammy Stein who, in the first months

Because what you read matters.   Subscribe to the Penguin Classics Newsletter here.   Happy February! While winter persists outside, we’re staying warm inside with brand-new classics, a celebration of a favorite alternative holiday, and an exciting read-a-thon featuring a beloved Penguin Classic. Read on to see all the bookish happenings this month, and let us

  Are you teaching Comparative American Literature? You can find books across this discipline through the course lists on our website. Here is a small selection of the books available:   African American Fiction   Arab American Fiction   Asian American Fiction   Jewish American Fiction   Latino/a and Chicano/a Fiction     Native American

Joan Didion, who passed away on December 23, 2021, was one of the country’s most trenchant writers and astute observers. Her works of fiction, commentary, and memoir have received numerous honors and are considered modern classics. Parul Sehgal described the prolific writer as “preoccupied with, and troubled by, mythos—of youth, of America’s founding, of social

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