Do You Teach History?

Cathy Park Hong will be awarded the American Book Award for Minor Feelings, a ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness. With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and

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

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

Labor Day is an annual celebration of the social and economic achievements of American workers. We remember workers who have organized and fought throughout the labor movement to give workers the protections they have today, and those who continue to fight for equal and fair labor. The following books offer history and analysis of the

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”

Michael Heller and Jim Salzman, the authors of Mine! How the hidden rules of ownership control our lives, have written an open-source Teacher’s Manual available for free download. Mine! is the first popular story-based book to bring together the basics of modern property law. The authors explain modern property law—the rules for who gets what and

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

William Melvin Kelley and illustrator Aiki Kelley are being awarded the American Book Award for Dunfords Travels Everywheres, a Joycean, Rabelaisian romp in which he brings back some of his most memorable characters in a novel of three intertwining stories.   “Among the most innovative and exciting novelists in the history of international literature, the

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,

Contributed by Lisa Miller, PhD, author of The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life As an undergraduate psychology major at Yale, I always sat in the front row so that I might study not only the material but my professor as well. Like many students who sign