Since his time in the White House, former President Barack Obama has been sharing his favorite reads from the previous months. Here are his most recent PRH and distributed client title recommendations spanning everything from the most talked-about novels, insightful nonfiction, and everything in between.

On November 9, 2021, the Penguin Press will publish AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BOOKS: A Literary Journey. 

Inspired by Jules Verne’s hero Phileas Fogg, author David Damrosch, chair of Harvard University’s department of comparative literature and founder of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature, set out to counter a pandemic’s restrictions on travel by exploring eighty exceptional books from around the globe. Following a literary itinerary from London to Venice, Tehran and points beyond, and via authors from Woolf and Dante to Nobel Prize–winners Orhan Pamuk, Wole Soyinka, Mo Yan, and Olga Tokarczuk, he explores how these works have shaped our idea of the world, and the ways in which the world bleeds into literature.

On Friday, June 11, the Pulitzer Prize Committee announced its 2021 winners. PRH had several finalists, and we repost the PRH Prize-winners from prior years.

As soon as the pandemic and stay at home orders began in March of last year, sales of cookbooks jumped, including in the Baking category. Sales of Baking titles ended the year up 60% over prior year. Bread, cake, cookies and more – PRH and our distributed clients have the top-selling titles.

Kicking off on Monday, October 26th and running through Monday, November 30th, Oprah Winfrey’s “The Books That Help Me Through” will feature 7 titles—5 of which are Penguin Random House titles—that have provided her solace during uncertain times. This series will be featured on Oprah’s Book Club, Twitter & Instagram accounts. Each week will be

We raise a glass (and a fork!) to all the award-winning Penguin Random House titles this year, and we continue to celebrate our winners from years past. Discover all of our 2020 winners and nominees and explore our full James Beard collection for all winning titles.

The next Title Wave pick, PRETTY THINGS by Janelle Brown, hits shelves on April 21, 2020. Read up on previous picks to prepare for what is sure to be the next exciting launch in this program.

“Ernest J. Gaines, award-winning novelist and author of the acclaimed The Autobiography of Jane Pittman, and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant recipient, died of a heart attack while sleeping at his home in Oscar, Louisiana. He was 86.

A member of a longtime family of Louisiana sharecroppers, Gaines was born in poverty on the River Lake Plantation near False River. He was schooled on the plantation by seasonal visiting teachers and eventually moved to California at the age of 15 (schooling for African American kids ended at the 8th grade). Gaines attended San Francisco State University, and served two years in the Army, before winning a writing fellowship to Stanford University.”

– Publishers Weekly

On December 5, one of our most acclaimed and beloved authors celebrates her 85th birthday. The Cut describes Didion thusly, all reasons for celebration: “Embodies chic Californian minimalism, basically lived the plot of The Bell Jar, gave writers permission to hate New York, made angsty fragility poetic (undoubtedly inspiring future generations of anorexia memoirists), and most important, turned being small, feminine, and shy — all handicaps in a man’s world — into the ultimate professional advantage.”

For the first time since 1992, the Booker Prize has been awarded jointly, and its 2019 winners are both Penguin Random House authors:

Margaret Atwood’s THE TESTAMENTS and Bernardine Evaristo’s GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER.

Today the Swedish Academy awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature to Olga Tokarczuk, published in the U.S. by Riverhead and Penguin Random House Audio.

The Academy cites Olga for “a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.”

Penguin Random House imprints and distributed clients publish nine of the 25 finalists for the 2019 National Book Awards. The short lists for each of the five categories were announced on October 8 by the National Book Foundation. See the complete list of PRH titles which have won the National Book Award throughout history here.