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It's time to celebrate after a year of hard work and great success! Penguin Group (USA)'s New York office will be closed from Thursday, December 24, 2009 - Sunday January 3, 2010, reopening on Monday January 4, 2010.

While we're away, here's a roadmap to help you continue to enjoy the most exciting content in publishing: 

Our newest episodes of From the Publisher's Office include timely holiday treats in the Radio Room, the Reading Room, and the Screening Rooom. In the Radio Room, we have the full audiobook of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, a Radio Room Special featuring Mike Huckabee author of A Simple Christmas, "Tolstoy's Last Year" in Penguin Classics on Air, and Robert Frost's famous poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is featured in A Cup of Poetry.

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Audiobook Excerpts (14)

Audiobook Excerpt The Killing Dance Unabridged CDs: An Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Novel Laurell K. Hamilton (Penguin Audio)

Audiobook Excerpt The Killing Dance Unabridged CDs: An Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Novel Laurell K. Hamilton (Penguin Audio)

Audiobook Excerpt Burnt Offerings Unabridged CDs: An Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Novel Laurell K. Hamilton (Penguin Audio)

Audiobook Excerpt Burnt Offerings Abridged CDs: An Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Novel Laurell K. Hamilton (Penguin Audio)

Audiobook Excerpt The Killing Dance Abrdiged CDs: Laurell K. Hamilton (Penguin Audio)

Audiobook Excerpt Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us Daniel H. Pink (Penguin Audio)

Audiobook Excerpt The Betrayal of the Blood Lily Lauren Willig (Penguin Audio)

Audiobook Excerpt Kisser: A Stone Barrington Novel Stuart Woods (Penguin Audio)

Audiobook Excerpt The Brightest Star in the Sky Marian Keyes, Caitriona Keyes (Penguin Audio)

Audiobook Excerpt Saving CeeCee Honeycutt Beth Hoffman (Penguin Audio)

Audiobook Excerpt Riches Within Your Reach! Robert Collier (Penguin Audio)

 

 

 

 

» Ben Huh discusses the popularity of Cheezburger network sites, such as icanhascheezburger.com and graphjam.com, which have led to several website-to-book bestsellers. He also discusses the obscure origins of the first LOLcat.

» Read more about How to Take Over Teh Wurld and I Can Has Cheezburger?.

Penguin Podcast, Professor Happycat, Ben Huh, I Can Has Cheezburger, How to Take Over Teh Wurld

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For the last edition of Spotlight of the year, we wanted to take a look back at some of the highlights from among Penguin Group (USA)’s extraordinary 2009 successes.

Great 2009 Publishing Stories Led by Bestsellers from Charlaine Harris, Kathryn Stockett, Nora Roberts, and Greg Mortenson

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Having been asked (about fifteen times) to post this, I now present you with the recipe for dark chocolate chip pomegranate cookies.  You will need:

* Three cups of all-purpose flour
* One teaspoon of baking soda
* One-half teaspoon of salt
* One cup of granulated sugar
* Two-thirds of a cup of packed light brown sugar

* One cup of softened butter or margarine
* Two large eggs
* One tablespoon of vanilla extract
* One quarter-cup of pomegranate molasses

* One twelve-ounce bag of dark chocolate chips
* One-half cup of pomegranate seeds

Line several cookie trays with parchment paper, as the cookies will be sticky when they first come out of the oven, and it's best if they stick to something other than your actual cookie tray (you may need it for another batch, depending on how many trays you have).  Mix your flour, baking soda, and salt in a bowl that you aren't in danger of knocking over.  Put it to one side.  In another, bigger bowl, mix your butter, granulated sugar, white sugar, pomegranate molasses, eggs, and vanilla until they form a sugary pudding-like goo that you really just want to eat with a spoon (but won't, due to the presence of raw eggs in the mix).

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With all the peace and good will toward men floating around this time of year, it's easy to start wishing for something a little bit more, well, visceral.  In the interests of helping to control this urge, here's a party game the whole family can play.  Let's make a horror movie!

First, pick your genre.  What, you thought you already had?  Oh, no.  There are four major types of horror movie:

1.  The Psycho.  A killer hunts and slaughters people--usually attractive teens, although some killers have been known to branch out along other specialized lines.  Usually difficult or impossible to kill, sometimes ironic in method of death, prone to sequels.
2.  The Creature. This genre divides into "big" and "lots": either your creature is ginormous for some reason, or there's a swarm.  Sometimes, the over-ambitious combine the two, and have a swarm of giant whatever-it-is trying to eat mankind.  This is generally a winning approach.
3.  The Supernatural.  Ghosts, witches, warlocks, a killer Santa Claus taking back all the toys he's distributed over the generations, it all gets filed under the generic catch-all of "supernatural."  Sometimes, your psycho or your creature is supernatural, too.  This is what we call "double-dipping."
4.  The Outsider. Aliens and extra-dimensional entities go here.  Sometimes, your psycho or your creature is from outside, in addition to being, y'know, bad for your health.  Mostly, though, aliens get their own designation.

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This week's episode of A Cup of Poetry features "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost read by Sarah Christensen Fu.

Listen to A Cup of Poetry now and read the poem below!

Subscribe to the FREE podcast feed in the iTunes store.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Book: Hardcover | 7.40 x 8.62in | 32 pages | ISBN 9780525467342 | 24 Sep 2001 | Dutton Children's | 4 - AND UP years

$16.99 - Add to Cart

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

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1.  I would not get any writing done, at all, ever, if it weren't for my day planner.  I carry a Frankin-Covey Classic planner in the Simplicity page style, which is a fancy planner geek way of saying "I am really, really type-A about my to-do lists."  Every day, I enter word counts and project updates in the "what I need to do" section, and I don't go to bed until everything has been checked off.  My planner weighs more than my laptop does, and doubles as a useful bludgeoning device in case of zombie attack.  I would probably catch fire if my planner were ever lost.  Actual fire.

2.  I tend to work out tricky bits of dialog by talking to myself.  Maybe this wouldn't be so silly if I only did it at the privacy of my own keyboard, but I also like to take very long walks.  The whole "hold your cellphone up to your ear and pretend that you're on a call" doesn't really work when you're actively keeping up both sides of a violent argument.  I'm reasonably sure all my neighbors think I'm dangerously insane.  That's actually fine by me, since it keeps them out of my yard.

3.  Sometimes, what looks like me goofing off is actually the hardest part of the writing process.  If I get really, really stuck on something, I'll generally respond by either a) stomping into the back room of my house and putting on the dumbest horror flick I can find, or b) leaving the house entirely and going to the movies.  This allows me to disconnect approximately half of my brain--the half that gets in the way of seeing the story clearly--and really focus on what needs to happen next.  At the end of Hellboy II, I literally responded to "What did you think of the movie?" by bursting into tears and wailing about a character's hair being the wrong color.  I work very hard when I don't seem to be working at all.

4.  Part of why I tend to be working on several projects at once is my tendency to get really depressed when I finish something.  It's like I was on a wonderful adventure, and now it's over, and all I can do is look at the pictures I took while I was there, and maybe plan to take another trip someday (but you know it'll never be the same, because it never is).  Editing and revisions are exciting in their own way, but they're really the equivalent of scrapbooking that first amazing trip.  The best way to avoid the depression is to make sure I'm never left with the time to just sit on my hands and mope.

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Jane Austen, the woman who launched a thousand books, was born December 16^th, 1775. In her life, Jane only published four novels, after her death she had two more published and today it is possible to find a volume of her shorter works.

Could Jane Austen have imagined the amount of writers she would inspire a century and a half onward? Today, updated and inspired by versions of her books are everywhere (Bridget Jones Diary), there are books about people reading Jane Austen and having emotional journeys along with her heroines (The Jane Austen Book Club), books about accidentally ending up in an Austen novel (Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict), books where you can create your own Austenian adventure (Lost in Austen), and last but not least, sequels, prequels and other additions to the stories Austen wrote (The Confession of Fitzwilliam Darcy and Mr. Knightley's Diary).

In celebration of Jane Austen's birthday on December 16^th, Penguin USA will use the Twitter hashtag #AustenAddiction,  following Penguin Australia's idea, and will promote our Austen titles, do a giveaway, link to online video and radio segments and any relevant pop culture tidbits through the day.

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I think most of us are familiar with the phrase "busman's holiday": a holiday or vacation during which you do what you do for the rest of the year (so the busman has to drive the family to their destination, the lion tamer has to take the kids to the movies, the chef has to cook the holiday goose).  It's usually used to imply that the holiday wasn't very good, since it wasn't a break from the norm.  Well, I'd like to propose a new phrase for our universal lexicon.  The writer's holiday: a holiday or vacation during which you do what you do for the rest of the year, only more so.

Most of the writers I know write every day.  Not "every day except weekends, holidays, and birthdays."  Every day.  Many of us still have day jobs, which means that the main difference between Saturday and Monday is when you get to sit down at that keyboard and start hammering away.  On a weekday, I usually get between two and four hours of good writing time in, depending on what else is going on (and how annoying my cats are).  On weekends and vacation days, I can manage between five and nineteen hours of good writing time.  (Once, when under deadline, I managed to keep writing for twenty-seven hours straight.  I do not recommend this, as the amount of caffeine it required was probably medically unwise.)