Freshman Year Reading Categories Fiction and Poetry The Writer's World Multi-Cultural Lives History Politics and Society Life Stories and Memoirs How We Live Inspirational Religious Science and Technology Nature and the Environment Life and College Guides Return to Academic Homepage

Tell Us About Your Program
Email address:

First Name:

Last Name:

School:

I would like to
subscribe
unsubscribe
to this newsletter.

Includes a broad selection of fiction and non-fiction books of interest to first-year programs.

Freshman Year Reading 2009 (Knopf Group only)

Random House, Inc. Freshman Year Reading 2009



FYE Adoptions
book cover
Seattle University has selected The Open Road as its common reading book.
book cover The University of Alabama at Birmingham has chosen Mountains Beyond Mountains for its Freshman Year Experience program.
book cover Stanford University incoming Freshman will read My Own Country this fall.



San Jose State has chosen Color of the Sea for their 2009 Campus Reading Program this fall.
Virginia Tech has selected Ecological Intelligence for the 2009-2010 Common Book Project.


Featured Author

Funny in Farsi offers readers an intimate look at the immigrant experience through the lens of an exceptional—and exceptionally funny—Iranian family. Author Firoozeh Dumas’s poignant descriptions of what it feels like to be a stranger in a strange land will resonate with anyone who has ever experienced social alienation at any stage of life.

Listen to Firoozeh Dumas discuss her work below and student reactions and discussions:
Random House Speakers Bureau
Freshman Year Reading

Random House, Inc. publishes a broad selection of fiction and non-fiction books appropriate for first-year and Freshman Reading programs. The books suggested here should help initiate reflection and discussion among your incoming first-year students, who will begin their academic lives with a shared experience. They'll be prepared to discuss the stories of others and, thus, ready to share their own.

Many authors featured below are available to visit college campuses as part of a first-year program. Please email us for further information.

To order examination copies of any of these titles, please follow the instructions on our Examination Copy page.

Conference Update

Did you miss the Random House FYE Luncheon?

Click here for video of the introduction.

Click each author name to view a video: Donovan Campbell (Joker One), Louise Steinman (The Souvenir), Michael Greenberg (Hurry Down Sunshine), John Elder Robison (Look Me in the Eye) and Tracy Kidder (Strength in What Remains / Mountains Beyond Mountains).

High quality audio clips are also available:

Introduction

Donovan Campbell

Louise Steinman

Michael Greenberg

John Elder Robison

Tracy Kidder

Q & A

Featured Titles

book cover
Sum
Forty Tales from the Afterlives
Written by David Eagleman

Format: Hardcover
On Sale: February 10, 2009
Price: $20.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-37734-0 (0-307-37734-2)


"Sum is an imaginative and provocative book that gives new perspectives on how to view ourselves and our place in the world." —Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams

Sum is a dazzling exploration of funny and unexpected afterlives that have never been considered—each presented as a vignette that offers students a stunning lens through which to see themselves. These wonderfully imagined tales—at once funny, wistful, and unsettling—are rooted in science and romance and awe at our mysterious existence: a mixture of death, hope, computers, immortality, love, biology, and desire that exposes radiant new facets of our humanity.
book cover
The Life You Can Save
Acting Now to End World Poverty
Written by Peter Singer

Format: Hardcover, 224 pages
On Sale: March 3, 2009
Price: $22.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6710-7 (1-4000-6710-3)


In The Life You Can Save, philosopher Peter Singer, named one of "The 100 Most Influential People in the World" by Time magazine, uses ethical arguments, provocative thought experiments, illuminating examples, and case studies of charitable giving to show that our current response to world poverty is not only insufficient but ethically indefensible. Well-researched and highly-informing, The Life You Can Save is also a call-to-action for all students.

book cover
The Working Poor
Invisible in America
Written by David K. Shipler

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
On Sale: January 4, 2005
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-70821-3 (0-375-70821-9)

"Nobody who works hard should be poor in America," writes Pulitzer Prize winner David Shipler. Clear-headed, rigorous, and compassionate, he journeys deeply into the lives of individual store clerks and factory workers, farm laborers and sweat-shop seamstresses, illegal immigrants in menial jobs and Americans saddled with immense student loans and paltry wages.

"An essential book. . . . It should be required reading not just for every member of Congress, but for every eligible voter." —The Washington Post Book World

The Working Poor has been adopted for common reading programs by Lafayette College; Carleton College; Ohio State University-Mansfield; University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Case Western Reserve University; University of North Texas; Presbyterian College; Roger Williams University.
book cover
When Skateboards Will Be Free
A Memoir of a Political Childhood
Written by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

Format: Hardcover, 304 pages
On Sale: March 24, 2009
Price: $22.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-34068-7 (0-385-34068-0)


Saïd's Iranian-born father and American Jewish mother had one thing in common: their unshakable conviction that the workers' revolution was coming. Separated since their son was nine months old, they each pursued a dream of the perfect socialist society. Pinballing with his mother between makeshift Pittsburgh apartments, Saïd waits for the revolution that never, ever arrives.

When the Iran hostage crisis erupts, he is suddenly forced to confront the combustible stew of his identity: as an American, an Iranian, a Jew, a socialist, and a middle-school kid who loves football and video games.