Ever wonder what Penguin Random House employees are reading? We’re a bunch of professionally bookish people, so you can always count on us to have a book on hand… or thirty piled on our desks. Our Bookspotting feature shows off the range of readers behind the scenes at Penguin Random House. Â
Emily in Digital Marketing is reading The Secret History by Donna Tartt.
Show us what you’re reading by using the #bookspotting hashtag!
The Penguin Random House team has come up with sixteen spine-tingling, spook-tastic contenders in four classic book categories that’ll make you sleep with the light on. Vote every week in a new round to determine the ultimate terrifying read!
Each week, there will be a drawing to see who wins a set of the Penguin Horror Classics set, edited by lifelong horror literature lover, Guillermo Del Toro.
Meet this week’s kickoff contenders: vote for one of each of these match-ups, and enter HERE for a chance to win the prize. Follow on social media and share your thoughts with the hashtag #scarysixteen.
WEEK 5:The Stand vs. The Haunting of Hill House
The classic post-apocalyptic tale from the modern-day master of the macabre takes on the mother of all haunted house stories in this WINNER-TAKE-ALL battle for your nightmares. Which creepy read deserves to be crowned the scariest of them all?
If you haven’t read the books mentioned above, check them out here!
If you’d prefer to buy from an independent bookseller, check out IndieBound to find a bookstore near you.
Check back next week to see who’s made the cut!
The Penguin Random House team has come up with sixteen spine-tingling, spook-tastic contenders in four classic book categories that’ll make you sleep with the light on. Vote every week in a new round to determine the ultimate terrifying read!
Each week, there will be a drawing to see who wins a set of the Penguin Horror Classics set, edited by lifelong horror literature lover, Guillermo Del Toro.
Congratulations to last week’s winner, Kristi from Chambersburg, PA!Â
Meet this week’s kickoff contenders: vote for one of each of these match-ups, and enter HERE for a chance to win the prize. Follow on social media and share your thoughts with the hashtag #scarysixteen.
WEEK 4:
Could you survive the night in either one of these HAUNTED MANSIONS? From the ghoulish HILL HOUSE to the menacing home of USHER, both of these terrifying tales will leave you saying, “You know what, forget buying, I think I’ll just keep renting this apartment.”
Dracula vs. The Stand  What’s more terrifying — blood sucking ghouls or pandemic-inducing flus?
If you haven’t read the books mentioned above, check them out here!
If you’d prefer to buy from an independent bookseller, check out IndieBound to find a bookstore near you.
Check back next week to see who’s made the cut!
The Penguin Random House team has come up with sixteen spine-tingling, spook-tastic contenders in four classic book categories that’ll make you sleep with the light on. Vote every week in a new round to determine the ultimate terrifying read!
Each week, there will be a drawing to see who wins a set of the Penguin Horror Classics set, edited by lifelong horror literature lover, Guillermo Del Toro.
Congratulations to last week’s winner, Jake from Greenwich Connecticut!Â
Meet this week’s kickoff contenders: vote for one of each of these match-ups, and enter HERE for a chance to win the prize. Follow on social media and share your thoughts with the hashtag #scarysixteen.
WEEK 3:
Two books set in our world, but after devastating events that have annihilated the population. Each pits a few who cling to love and compassion against those who are driven by the darker side of human nature. Which made you consider becoming a prepper? What haunted you long after you finished reading?
Frankenstein vs. Dracula Â
Mary Shelley’s scientist and his infamous monster take on Bram Stoker’s dark Count and the heroic Van Helsing. One eventually inspired Young Frankenstein and the other eventually inspired Twilight. Which original monster came the most alive for you from the pages of these classics?
What’s scarier? The notorious Hill House that arouses your paranormal curiosity while gathering its powers to make unsuspecting visitors its own? OR A ghost story that needs no chains and demonic voices. A novel that creates an atmosphere of tingling suspense and unspoken horror and has been a masterpiece of the supernatural for a century.
Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre vs. The Fall of the House of Usher In the last round of the Worst Fears category two of horror’s biggest names face off for the right to move on to the Frightening Four – Edgar Allen Poe or H.P. Lovecraft, who is the true master of fear?
If you haven’t read the books mentioned above, check them out here!
If you’d prefer to buy from an independent bookseller, check out IndieBound to find a bookstore near you.
Check back next week to see who’s made the cut!
The Penguin Random House team has come up with sixteen spine-tingling, spook-tastic contenders in four classic book categories that’ll make you sleep with the light on. Vote every week in a new round to determine the ultimate terrifying read!
Each week, there will be a drawing to see who wins a set of the Penguin Horror Classics set, edited by lifelong horror literature lover, Guillermo Del Toro.
Congratulations to last week’s winner, Ashley from Massillon, Ohio!Â
Meet this week’s kickoff contenders: vote for one of each of these match-ups, and enter HERE for a chance to win the prize. Follow on social media and share your thoughts with the hashtag #scarysixteen.
WEEK 2:The Ruins vs. Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre: The Best of H. P. Lovecraft A book which will cause you to fear your garden takes on an author whose stories will haunt your dreams…It’s the book Stephen King called “the best horror novel of the new century” versus the author King hailed as “the 20th Century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.”
  Haunted vs. The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings In Haunted, eighteen wanna-be writers set off on a retreat but instead are trapped in an abandoned theater by a mysterious benefactor with unknown motives – the result is twenty three of the most disturbing, stomach-churning stories you’ve ever dared to read. Beating hearts, swinging pendulums and speaking ravens all haunt the definitive collection of short stories from the master of the genre–Edgar Allan Poe–in The Fall of House of Usher and Other Writings. Which collection of haunted tales make you want to sleep with the lights on? Â
Where’s the worst place to spend a night? In an old house in a small Vermont town with a history of ghosts, sightings, and altogether creepy occurrences over the last 100 years or the notorious Hill House that arouses your paranormal curiosity and while gathering its powers to make unsuspecting visitors its own?
  The Turn of the Screw vs. The Little Stranger  In these two novels, Henry James and Sarah Waters explore the nature of evil – and the apparently inevitable creepiness of English country estates. Which epically haunting masterpiece makes you jump at every bump in the night – the gothic classic or the 2009 Man Booker nominee?
Click the image below to see the full-size bracket, and check back next week to find out who survived the first round!
If you haven’t read the books mentioned above, check them out here!
If you’d prefer to buy from an independent bookseller, check out IndieBound to find a bookstore near you.
Check back next week to see who’s made the cut!
Get to know the newest Penguin Random House imprint! Tim Duggan Books was founded in 2014 and is committed to the highest standard of storytelling across a range of genres. Our list of books is small, select, and curated from both well-established and brand new authors, including Eric Schlosser, Timothy Snyder, Emily Barton, Michael Kinsley, Yasmine El Rashidi, and Colin Jost. The imprint is dedicated to publishing books of quality, accuracy, elegance, and vision, and to authors who take risks and tell singular stories.Read on for an interview with Tim Duggan about this exciting new imprint. What do you look for in the books and authors that you acquire?
The first thing I usually look for in a book is the voice, which hopefully has energy and confidence and personality, and not a whiff of pretension. You can usually tell from the first page whether an author’s writing feels genuine and fresh and powerful, and whether there’s a real sense of urgency there, as if the author almost had no choice but to write this book. So in that sense I’m drawn toward books that somehow feel essential, by authors who are driven by a passion that probably borders on obsession, no matter what the genre is. For an author, that’s something you can’t manufacture, and for an editor, that’s the gold standard, and it’s a big part of what I’m looking for.
In what way do you think Tim Duggan books aligns with the Crown publishing group?
I’ve been incredibly impressed, long before I came here, with the way Crown has been publishing its books, from marketing, publicity, and sales to art, design, and production. There’s a wide variety of imprints, all of which struck me as very focused and backed by clever campaigns and extraordinary attention to detail. My imprint is small, selective, and idiosyncratic, so I feel I have plenty of room here to pursue what I want to pursue, while tapping into the deep pool of knowledge and resources that Crown is known for. It turned out to be a really easy and natural fit.
Tim DugganWhat has been the hardest part of launching your own imprint?
Ask me in a month! Truth be told, the first year has been totally exhilarating and fun, and part of that is probably a result of the fact that I’ve been doing more acquiring and editing at this point than anything else. That will change this fall when the first books hit the market, which I’m looking forward to. So I’m not even sure that starting an imprint is the hard part – but maintaining it and keeping up the momentum surely will be.
Has it always been a goal of yours to launch your own imprint, or did it come about more organically?
It came about pretty organically, in that I’ve always thought that having a little imprint within a much bigger organization would be the best of both worlds, which is definitely how this feels. I wanted to have a small list with a wide range, which comes out to about ten books a year, half fiction and half nonfiction, including memoir, humor, science, and poetry. My sense is that the whole publishing marketplace, from authors and agents to critics and booksellers, has been really supportive of small imprints like this one, which helped pave the way for me and made it a little less daunting – just knowing that even though I’m on my own, there are others out there who’ve done this and done it really well. Not to mention that once I got here and saw the level of support I had from my colleagues, it actually felt a lot less like I was on my own.
Check out the new books from the Tim Duggan imprint:Â
Learn more about the imprint here.
What’s the best creepy read to curl up with on a chilly fall evening? The Penguin Random House team has come up with sixteen spine-tingling, spook-tastic contenders in four classic book categories that’ll make you sleep with the light on. Vote every week in a new round to determine the ultimate terrifying read!
Each week, there will be a drawing to see who wins a set of the Penguin Horror Classics set, edited by lifelong horror literature lover, Guillermo Del Toro.
Let’s get started! Meet this week’s kickoff contenders: vote for one of each of these match-ups, and enter HERE for a chance to win the prize. Follow on social media and share your thoughts with the hashtag #scarysixteen.
WEEK 1:Â The Road vs. World War Z
The apocalypse in World War Z is a busy and bloody chaos — the terrifying spread of two hundred million zombies devoted to consuming all life on earth is realistically recounted for us in every gory detail. The apocalypse in The Road is barren and cold – the Pulitzer Prize winning book follows father and son as they travel through the abyss, dodging unknown perils at every turn en route to their only hope: the coast. Which post-apocalyptic tale has you running for your panic room?
The Stand vs. The Handmaid’s Tale The forces of Good and Evil clash in a world ravaged by disease in Stephen King’s massive, magnificent The Stand. In her masterpiece, The Handmaiden’s Tale, Margaret Atwood exposes a woman’s terrifying existence under a brutal totalitarian regime. Which book best imagines a horrifying future of humanity on the brink?
Frankenstein vs.Infected
What’s scarier? Victor Frankenstein’s terrible creation of an anguished monster or an alien disease that turns ordinary Americans into raving, paranoid murderers who inflict brutal horrors on strangers, their own families, and even themselves?
Dracula vs. Salem’s Lot The King of Horror takes on the king of all vampire novels – which is scarier? Vampires in small-town Maine or THE vampire in 19th Century London? Â
Click the image below to see the fullsize bracket, and check back next week to find out who survived the first round!
If you haven’t read the books mentioned above, check them out here!
The 2015 National Book Award Fiction Longlist was unveiled this morning, with four Penguin Random House titles recognized as semi-finalists:
Earlier this week, these Penguin Random House books were selected for their respective National Book Award Longlists.
Nonfiction
Emily in Digital Marketing is reading The Secret History by Donna Tartt.
Show us what you’re reading by using the #bookspotting hashtag!
