Random House, Inc. Sponsors Family Literacy Guide

On April 18, the New York Post carried a special twenty-page supplement "Opening The Door To Learning: Literacy Is A Family Affair," made possible by Random House, Inc. We created this family literacy guide in partnership with New Visions For Public Schools, a private non-profit organization, and the New York City Department of Education. It has been used extensively by elementary and middle schools in New York City in its booklet format since November 2005.

Schools throughout the city will each have at least 100 copies of the booklet on hand for distribution. It is also available for download from the New York City Department of Education Website. The guide has been newly translated into Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Spanish, Korean, Russian, Urdu, and Haitian/Creole to better enable building literacy skills in more young people.

Our sponsorship of the Family Literacy Guide is just one of many ongoing and evolving Random House, Inc. efforts to foster and strengthen reading and a love for books.

Click here to download the PDF.

Random House, Inc.'s 2007 Pulitzer Prizes

Random House, Inc. is pleased to announce that four of our titles have been awarded 2007 Pulitzer Prizes. The winners are as follows:

Fiction: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

History: The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff

Biography: The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher by Debby Applegate

General Nonfiction: The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright

Ray Bradbury also received a Special Citation for his distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.

Click here for a complete listing of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize winners.

Kurt Vonnegut Dies at 84

Counterculture literary hero and bestselling author Kurt Vonnegut has passed away at the age of 84. Critically-acclaimed yet also controversial, many of his novels--including Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions--have become modern-day classics as well as course adoption staples.

Random House published his most recent work, A Man Without A Country, in paperback this past January.

Click here for the New York Times Obituary.

Please click here for a complete listing of his work available from Random House.

Operation Homecoming Film to Debut on PBS in April 2007

Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, part of a series of films entitled "America at a Crossroads" that explore the challenges confronting the post-9/11 world, will premier on PBS in April 2007.

The film is based on the Random House book Operation Homecoming, which is the result of a major initiative launched by the National Endowment for the Arts to bring distinguished writers to military bases and inspire U.S. Marines, soldiers, sailors, and airmen and their families to record their wartime experiences.

During this initiative, encouraged by such authors as Tom Clancy, Mark Bowden, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff, Jeff Shaara, and Marilyn Nelson, American military personnel and their loved ones wrote candidly about what they saw, heard, and felt while in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as on the home front.

Click here to read an excerpt of Operation Homecoming.

For more information on the film, click here.

To read more about the NEA initiative, click here.

• We're pleased to welcome North Atlantic Books as one of our newest distribution clients. North Atlantic is a leading and eclectic publisher of books covering a variety of topics--including health, martial arts, and sports history--and is fiercely committed to the development and dissemination of new and non-traditional ideas.

• We're delighted to premier our free magazine for middle- and high-school educators: RHI. The topic of the first issue is one that is of ever-increasing importance, especially in light of "No Child Left Behind" legislation: how educators can employ new and different strategies in reaching reluctant readers. If you would like to receive a complimentary, printed copy of the magazine, please email us.

• Shirin Ebadi's Iran Awakening has been included in the ALA's 2007 Amelia Bloomer Project List. This list recommends books that "represent the best that this year has to offer for feminist books for young readers."