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.

The September 20th selection of eight works of longlisted Fiction published by Penguin Random House imprints completes the week-long unveiling of the semi-finalists for the 2019 National Book Awards. We have a total of 17  books in the running.

Three books from PRH imprints have been longlisted for a 2019 National Book Award in Nonfiction:

WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD IS TRUE by Carolyn Forche (Penguin Press)
SAY NOTHING by Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday)
THE HEARTBEAT OF WOUNDED KNEE by David Treuer (Riverhead)

Two Penguin Random House authors have made the cut for this year’s shortlist, Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie, for the prize whose winner will be named on October 14. The Booker is the leading literary award in the English speaking world, which has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over 50 years. It is awarded annually to the best novel of the year written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. Penguin Random House and distributed clients have published 38 previous Winners of the Booker, so booksellers have plenty of books to highlight when this year’s new winner is announced!

Toni Morrison has died at the age of eighty-eight. 

Morrison’s novels were celebrated and embraced by booksellers, critics, educators, readers, and librarians. Her work also ignited controversy, notably in school districts that tried to ban her books. Few American writers won more awards for their books and writing. Morrison was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Beloved. In 1993, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, with the Swedish Academy recognizing her as an author “who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” In 1996, she was honored with the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2012, President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.