Elda Rotor’s
Must-Read Classics

Audre Lorde’s essays and poetry are a formative part of my life. To have her seminal collection of essays and speeches in our new Penguin Vitae hardcover series is a personal thrill and helps to launch our new series to encourage people to celebrate the books that make up their personal canon and to share a diversity of storytellers to revisit and discover anew.

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month and I’m celebrating the many varied voices and perspectives of that identity. For America Is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan, we had such a great community of Filipino Americans involved with the Penguin Classic, from scholars to writers to artists, and the book’s publication as a whole offered a special level of recognition for me as a reader, a publisher, and an Asian American. It is a perfect partner to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and moves the lens across to show the brown laborers at work in the same fields. It brings to light the paradox of the American dream, how many people endure so much hardship and prejudice for the ideals of what the country can also be.

Every young adult should read this book when they are ready. It’s one of the first books I read where I felt such strong empathy for a vulnerable character, and it remains a chilling reminder to consider what character you would be if placed on that proverbial island. My Google Alert on this title never fails to highlight the book in reference to political coverage. Never forget Piggy.

Every time I read stories from this anthology my worldview changes a bit and always for the better. Who knows what migration will look like in the future, but it is one of the most powerful connectors to all our lives. These stories both give space to marginalized voices not often heard but also affirms how much we share within the human condition.

While some (including my 12 year old) may say they are almost finished with Netflix, there are still so many fantastic worlds to discover through literature. I am going to step into this one and read Frank Herbert’s classic before the big movie adaptation, which features language creation by my Penguin author David J. Peterson (The Art of Language Invention). I love this hardcover edition and the whole Penguin Galaxy series we published with a series introduction by Neil Gaiman and cover art by Alex Trochut. They are collectible deluxe objects of art.