Publisher profile
An imprint of Penguin Random House founded in 1994, Riverhead publishes literary fiction and nonfiction by authors with urgent, distinctive voices across a wide range of backgrounds.
Riverhead Books was founded in 1994 by Susan Petersen Kennedy as an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), now part of Penguin Random House. Geoffrey Kloske serves as President and Publisher, and Sarah McGrath has been Senior Vice President and Editor in Chief since 2006. The editorial team includes Rebecca Saletan, Courtney Young, and Parisa Ebrahimi, while editors such as Han Zhang focus on bringing contemporary Chinese-language fiction to English-speaking readers.
The imprint describes itself as a publisher of literary fiction and quality nonfiction. Its list spans memoir, narrative journalism, science writing, literary and historical fiction, and idea-driven books in business and technology. The stated editorial mission is to champion "urgent, unheard voices from a wide variety of backgrounds who have new perspectives and new stories to tell."
The roster reads like a who's who of contemporary lettered writing. Steven Johnson, whose narrative science includes The Ghost Map; Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner; Junot Díaz; George Saunders; Marlon James; Anne Lamott; Elizabeth Gilbert; James McBride; Randall Munroe; Sarah Vowell; Carlo Rovelli; and Olga Tokarczuk, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019. Lauren Groff's The Vaster Wilds also appears on WebToTell under this imprint, though her affiliation is not confirmed in the sources consulted here.
Riverhead authors have been winners or finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Booker Prize, the MacArthur "Genius Grant," the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. If you read for books that pair sharp narrative craft with a clear point of view, or that reframe a subject you thought you already knew, this is a list worth browsing.
Subjects: History & Society (2), Literary Fiction
Authors: Lauren Groff, Steven Johnson, Khaled Hosseini
History & Society
by Lauren Groff
The Vaster Wilds is a historical survival novel centered on a young English servant who escapes a devastated colonial settlement during the winter of 1609–1610.
History & Society
by Steven Johnson
The Ghost Map reconstructs the severe cholera outbreak that struck London’s Soho district in late August and early September 1854.
Literary Fiction
by Khaled Hosseini
The Kite Runner is a first-person novel about Amir, a privileged boy growing up in Kabul, and Hassan, the Hazara son of a servant in Amir’s household.
The facts on this page were checked against these sources.
