A third entity is in the running to buy Simon & Schuster, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing "people familiar with the situation." The bidder is Richard Hurowitz, an investor who has backing for the bid from Mubaldala Investment Co., the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth manager. Hurowitz and Mubaldala join HarperCollins and private equity fund KKR & Co. in the bidding. The Journal added that second-round bids are due in mid-July.

Hurowitz is CEO of Octavian & Co., an investment company, and publisher of the Octavian Report, a quarterly magazine that describes itself as "by leaders, for leaders. Ideas, intelligence, information, and insights from the world's top experts in economics, geopolitics, and culture." He is also the author of In the Garden of the Righteous: The Heroes Who Risked Their Lives to Save Jews During the Holocaust, published in January by Harper.

Mubaldala says its portfolio amounts to $276 billion and includes investments in healthcare, energy, and life sciences. Its chairman is Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, ruler of Abu Dhabi and president of the United Arab Emirates. He is the son of the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, for the whom the Sheikh Zayed Book Awards are named. The awards are presented annually at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair.

S&S owner Paramount Global had initially agreed in 2020 to sell S&S to Penguin Random House for $2.2 billion, but the Justice Department objected to that deal and sued, a case that PRH lost last October. The judge indicated that the factors leading to the ruling against a PRH-S&S deal might not apply to other publishers.

Greta Guck has purchased the Willow Bookstore in Perham, Minn., from Megan Wells, the Perham Focus reported.

Guck, who previously worked as a librarian for 11 years, took provisional ownership of the store on May 22. On June 15, she closed on her business loan and officially took over the store. She's made some minor changes already, including some new decor and rearranged bookshelves, and has larger changes planned.

Going forward, she'll focus more on fiction and especially on local and regional titles. Eventually she's going to add used books to the inventory and will create a program for buying customers' used titles in exchange for store credit. She wants to expand the store's event offerings, and in a year's time she plans to change the store's name to Big Pine Books, in honor of Perham's Big Pine Lake.

Guck grew up on Big Pine Lake before attending college at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. She lived and worked in Minneapolis for a time and returned to Perham in 2017. She had long dreamed of owning an independent bookstore, and when she learned earlier this year of Wells's intention to sell the store, she jumped at the opportunity.

"It's exciting, it's challenging," Guck told the Focus. "It's been a lot of work, and it will continue to be, but that is something I enjoy. I enjoy a challenge.... I'm very excited to be here on Main Street. I'm a Perham fan. I love Perham."

Ballast Book Co. in Bremerton, Wash., reopened late last month after undergoing renovations, the Seattle Times reported.

Owner Kate Larson closed the store for two weeks in May to install a new floor, put in some new bookshelves, and adjust a few inventory sections. Larson told the Times the new floor "gives the space a brighter feel" and allows her and her team more easily to move fixtures and displays. It also proved to be a major aesthetic improvement, with Larson noting that the store's old carpet had accrued a number of stains over the years.

The store's romance section has grown from "half a shelf to four shelves," Larson said, and the business section also saw an increase. The team added a new Northwest outdoors section that has already proven popular.

The bookstore celebrated the reopening with an event at the nearby Roxy Theatre featuring authors J.A. Jance, Brenda Novak, and Susan Wiggs.

Ricardo Alberto Maldonado

The Academy of American Poets has named Ricardo Alberto Maldonado as its next Executive Director and President. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Maldonado is poet and translator and the first Latino to lead the organization. He will officially start his new role on July 17.

Maldonado is currently the co-director of 92NY's Unterberg Poetry Center in NYC, where he has worked for 16 years, and he is the board chair of the Poetry Project. He is also on the board of the New York Foundation for the Arts as well as the poetry committee of the Brooklyn Book Festival. He has received fellowships from several foundations, including the NYFA and T.S. Eliot Foundation, and his poetry has been nominated for awards like the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award.

"We searched for a leader who was not merely seeking a job in poetry, but who was already fully invested in living out the vocation of poetry," said board chair Tess O'Dwyer, who went on to praise Maldonado's passion for and knowledge of poetry, as well as his leadership experience and project management skills. "The Board of Directors voted unanimously and enthusiastically to appoint Ricardo based on our belief that he will not only sustain the Academy’s marvelous array of poetry offerings but will also strengthen, expand, and deepen them in the years to come.”

Maldonado said: "I owe a debt of gratitude to the Academy of American Poets. Like the many millions of poets, educators, and readers across the world who have used its resources since 1934, I believe, to quote the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton, ‘that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.’ As poetry becomes increasingly available and more vital to our national conversation, and as the Academy looks toward its ninetieth anniversary in 2024, I am honored to carry forward the organization’s mission of serving readers and supporting poets at all stages of their careers."

Founded 89 years ago, the Academy of American Poets publishes contemporary poetry and annually awards over $1.3 million to more than two hundred poets at various stages of their careers.

Byron Barton

Byron Barton, children's picture book creator, died June 3, his publisher reported. He was 92.

Early in his career, Barton worked as a photo animator in television at CBS and an illustrator for an advertising studio. In 1971, his first book, Elephant, was published by Seabury Press. He then became the author-artist of many beloved picture books for the youngest reader, including My Car; My Bus; My Bike; and My House. He also illustrated books by other authors, among them Mirra Ginsburg, Russell Hoban, Jack Prelutsky, Charlotte Pomerantz, and Sarah Weeks.

His Greenwillow and HarperCollins titles have earned many awards and honors, including six ALA Notable Children's Books, a New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Books selection, six School Library Journal Best Books of the Year selections, and two Reading Rainbow picks. His books continue to be read, shared, and cherished by countless children and their librarians, teachers, and caregivers.

My House--published by Greenwillow Books in 2016--was Barton's last book. In recent years he created art through painting and other mediums such as fiber art and needlework.

Daniel Weizmann (right) discusses his debut mystery, The Last Songbird (Melville House), with author Ben Merlis (Goin' Off) before a packed house at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, Calif., last week. The novel is set in contemporary L.A.

"June isn’t over yet! Our Pride gift table still has plenty of amazing goodies to continue to celebrate queerness all year long," Brookline Booksmith, Brookline, Mass., posted on Instagram. 

"Mentally and physically we are here. Check out the interiors over at Montague Street. Our home in Brooklyn Heights is such a special place!" Books Are Magic, Brooklyn, N.Y., posted on Instagram.

The Seven Measures of the World by Piero Martin, translated by Gregory Conti (Yale University Press).

Sarah Snook (Succession) will play 26 characters in a new stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde's classic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Playbill reported. Adapted and directed by Sydney Theatre Company artistic director Kip Williams, the production's previews will begin January 23, 2024, prior to an official opening January 31 at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. Snook made her London stage debut in 2016 in Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder, opposite Ralph Fiennes.

Williams's "collision of form employs an interplay of video and theatre through an intricately choreographed collection of on-stage cameras bringing to life 26 characters, each played by Snook," Playbill noted.

"I am elated to return to the London stage in such an astonishing piece of theatre," Snook said. "From Oscar Wilde's remarkable original text to Kip Williams' stunning adaptation, this story of morality, innocence, narcissism, and consequence is going to be thrilling to recreate for a new audience. I can't wait."

The BBC has commissioned an adaptation of the memoir What It Feels Like For a Girl by Paris Lees, "one of the U.K.'s LGBTQIA+ community's most prominent figures, described by i-D magazine as 'the voice of a generation,' " Deadline reported. The eight-part series for BBC Three and BBC iPlayer, is billed as a "wild, anarchic spin on a coming-of-age drama," the project, will start filming next year.

Lees is adapting the story, with Chris Sweeney (The Tourist, Back to Life) as lead director. Hera Pictures (Mary & George, Temple) is producing. Both are executive producers alongside Liza Marshall and Ron O'Berst for Hera Pictures, with Nawfal Faizullah for the BBC. 

Describing What It Feels Like For a Girl as a "a deeply personal project," Lees said, "I'm excited, hysterical, thrown and overblown with bliss, but most of all I'm just having so much fun bringing this universe to life in a visual medium.... It's a primal scream--from the depths of a council estate--against a world that would prefer people who don't fit the norm didn't exist. But we do and we're not going away, we're not apologizing and we're not shutting up."

Semifinalists have been named for the $10,000 Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award, given to a book with "a thoroughbred horse racing premise/backdrop." The winner will be announced November 9.

The semifinalists, which include two novels, three biographical works, and a fictional oral history, are:

Horse by Geraldine Brooks
Secretariat: A 1970s Superstar by A.J. Chilson
Fast Ride: Spectacular Bid and the Undoing of a Sure Thing by Jack Gilden
Landaluce: The Story of Seattle Slew's First Champion by Mary Perdue
Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan

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The Blue Book of Nebo, written and translated by Manon Steffan Ros, won the YOTO Carnegie Medal for Writing, becoming the first translated work to win the award in its almost 90-year history. The original Welsh publication, Llyfr Glas Nebo, won multiple awards, including the 2019 Wales Book of the Year. Jeet Zdung took the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Illustration for Saving Sorya: Chang and the Sun Bear by Trang Nguyen. 

The winners each receive £500 (about $635) worth of books to donate to a library of their choice, a £5,000 (about $6,375) Colin Mears Award cash prize and a gold medal. The prizes are judged by children's librarians across the U.K.

Chair of judges Janet Noble said: "In The Blue Book of Nebo, the world building and distinct voices of the two main characters, the son and his mother, are expertly realized and the reader is compelled to question their own relationship with the modern world. Saving Sorya: Chang and the Sun Bear is a beautiful story, elegantly told, which brings together a global view of conservation and an empowering true story of an inspiring female environmentalist, told through dazzling manga art and watercolors. Jeet has crafted every illustration to immerse the reader, just as Manon draws the reader in completely with her vivid, deliberate prose."

I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys won this year's Yoto Carnegie Shadowers' Choice Medal for Writing, voted for by members of school reading groups who shadow the medals. The winner of the Yoto Carnegie Shadowers' Choice Medal for Illustration was The Comet by Joe Todd-Stanton.

photo: Picky Talarico

Javier Fuentes is a Spanish American writer and a 2018 Lambda Literary Fellow. He earned an MFA in fiction from Columbia University, where he was a teaching fellow. Born in Barcelona, he lives in New York. His first novel, Countries of Origin (Pantheon, June 6, 2023), is set over one summer in 2007, when star pastry chef Demetrio's lack of papers finally catches up with him.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

An undocumented queer pastry chef leaves New York to find his homeland, becomes a flâneur, ends up finding himself.

On your nightstand now:

The Lost Wife by Susanna Moore; La Mala Costumbre by Alana S. Portero (English translation forthcoming from HarperVia in 2024); The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard; The Final Voicemails: Poems by Max Ritvo; melatonin gummies.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Tintin in Tibet.

Your top five authors:

Let's rephrase it: top five authors you go back to again and again.

Javier Marías. A literary titan who demonstrated it is possible to write literary novels and, at the same time, reach a wide array of audiences across countries and cultures.

Rachel Cusk, whose novels are like a comfy room you never want to leave.

Italo Calvino, who left a body of work so multilayered that reading it is like looking through a glass, constantly changing.

Carmen Martín Gaite. A writer who helped me understand the Spain I grew up in and women like my mother.

James Purdy, an author ahead of his time. He committed his life to writing about outsiders and, by doing so, became himself, unjustly, an outsider in the literary world.

Book you've faked reading:

The Bible.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Mina Stone: Cooking for Artists. Simple Greek recipes even self-absorbed writers can prepare without burning down the house.

Book you've bought for the cover:

(AND the title)

A Year Without a Name by Cyrus Grace Dunham.

I just noticed there are two covers, but I am referring to the one from the first edition. It is a black-and-white photo of the author, their face covered with a beautiful grid of colors, textures, and parts of the body. Puzzling and soothing.  

Book you hid from your parents:

Thankfully, I never had to hide books from my parents, though I did conceal many letters from my best friend who, it then became clear, was my first homosexual love.

Book that changed your life:

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. I remember being a teenager in Madrid and my mom telling me the story of when she first read it. A friend had smuggled a copy from Paris, because it was banned in Spain during the dictatorship. A great story that instantly made me want to get my hands on it and made reading it even more thrilling, if that is possible.

Favorite line from a book:

"To dream the impossible dream, that is my quest." From Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. A line that brilliantly captures who the protagonist is and serves as a beacon for the story to come.

Five books you'll never part with:

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann; Orlando by Virginia Woolf; Coin Locker Babies by Ryū Murakami; On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry; Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. No other book has ever provided such solace in times of loss.

South, the first full-length novel from Iranian Canadian writer Babak Lakghomi (Floating Notes), is an unsettling surrealist portrait of surveillance and paranoia. B, a journalist, doesn't know what to expect when he is assigned to cover a series of labor strikes on an oil rig in the middle of the South, a mysterious desert country. With his marriage faltering at home and his book about his father still being altered by his editor into something unrecognizable, his life already feels like an unfamiliar place. But the isolation, corruption, and manipulation he finds in the South is beyond what he expected. Worse still is the unknowability of forces that seem to be bent on his destruction: evil spirits that travel on the wind and shadowy government forces alike.

Lakghomi's sparse, taut descriptions quickly conjure a world that exists uncannily alongside our own, one that reads like both a near-future dystopia and a recent-past industrial wasteland: "After the drought, men had moved in groups to work farther south. Oil rigs, refineries, steel. Lonely men away from their families, staring at screens. More steel factories and refineries were shutting down, letting people go. In the industrial towns, strikes every day. Tear gas and batons. Union leaders disappeared." The stories B hears from the haunted figures he encounters infuse this world with creeping superstitions and prophecies of doom that underline its precarious position, teetering on the brink of the past and the future. Together, these whispers and the phantom evidence of constant censorship and surveillance create an atmosphere of intangible but ever-present threat, one that effectively drives the narrative forward even as readers, like B, remain ever more in the dark.

B's hallucinatory nightmare--part fever dream and part psychoanalytic quest--fits into the contours of a noir: the personally troubled detective, a system of corruption that eludes discovery, a femme fatale flickering on the periphery. But the puzzle box nature of South refuses to fit neatly into one genre, instead recalling many and resisting easy categorization. The inability for the pieces of B's story and threads of his paranoia to ever tie completely together subverts readers' expectations of or desire for neat solutions. Ultimately, South achieves its effect primarily through its atmospheric tension, its disquieting setting, and its themes of guilt that leave both its protagonist and its readers seeking but never finding a true sense of agency or control. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor

Shelf Talker: A Lynchian descent into the paranoia and alienation of totalitarianism, South is a haunting and dreamlike novel from Babak Lakghomi.

Independent bookshops are unlike any other business group I have ever come across. They are rarely in competition with each other, instead they are a family spread across the country. They are so often more than bookshops and see themselves as vital spaces for their communities. Most importantly they are the spaces where the people who have become my dearest friends work and where I find my network of support that gives me advice, tips, funny stories, and helps me keep going. 

--Carolynn Bain, founder of Afrori Books, Brighton & Hove, on Independent Bookshop Week

Presented annually by the Booksellers Association through its Books Are My Bag campaign, Independent Bookshop Week (June 17-24) celebrates indie booksellers by highlighting the essential role they play in their communities. Hundreds of special activities are happening this week, including today's announcement of the Indie Book Awards, Saturday's Cosy Reading Night, High Five for Bookshops from National Book Tokens, as well as author readings, poetry open mic nights, family festivals, and much more.

Sadiq Khan at Pages of Hackney

For IBW's launch day, London Mayor Sadiq Khan checked in with several booksellers, including Riverside Bookshop, Pages of Hackney and Brick Lane Books. "London's brilliant independent bookshops play a vital role: economically, culturally and socially," he said.

On Wednesday, in a video filmed at his local bookshop--Gay's the Word bookstore in London--poet Dean Atta shared a new, bespoke IBW poem, "Thank You to All the Independent Booksellers" ("Thank you to the independent booksellers for helping to find/ the right books at the right moment for whoever walks through the door... who inspire loyalty, who inspire us/ to shop local, shop independent").

Books Are My Bag interviewed several booksellers about their careers, including Mel Griffin, owner of Griffin Books, Penarth; Alan Flank, co-owner of the Wonky Tree Bookshop, Leyburn; and Nik Lowe, manager of St. Helens Book Stop, Saint Helens.

As always, indie booksellers were sharing their IBW enthusiasm. Here's a sampling: 

Booka Bookshop, Oswestry: "Today marks the beginning of Independent Bookshop Week 2023 and at Booka we have a busy week of celebrations planned; from football to fundraising, from origami to afternoon tea, along with book fairs, book clubs and competition too--we hope to have something for everyone."

Westbourne Bookshop, Bournemouth: "Happy Indie Bookshop Week! National Book Tokens has given us a hundred £5 book tokens to gift to you, our gorgeous customers, with any book purchase. This is to thank you all for your continued love and support for Westbourne Bookshop. We couldn't keep serving our community if the community didn't take such good care of us. We're as grateful for you as you are for us!"

The Feminist Bookshop, Brighton: "Shopping independent in the current political climate is so important. We are much more than a bookshop and provide a welcoming community space for people to come together and discuss important topics. Tag your favourite indie bookshops below and share the love."

Goldsboro Books, London & Brighton: "Our small but mighty team. Here's a snapshot of some of the wonderful people who make Goldsboro Books what it is. From our passionate booksellers, to those working tirelessly behind the scenes to get the most unique and captivating books to our customers."

Portobello Bookshop

Portobello Bookshop, Edinburgh, Scotland: "We're so excited to celebrate indie bookselling and all our fantastic fellow independent bookshops both far and near this coming week. We're over the moon with our #IndieBookshopWeek window which was designed and drawn by our incredibly talented bookseller Anna!"

Red Lion Books, Colchester: "Juliet Townsend painted this on one of the hottest days of the year!"

Golden Hare Books, Edinburgh, Scotland: "This #IndieBookshopWeek, we want to highlight some of our Stockbridge heroes. An independent bookshop is not a self-contained universe, and we are so lucky with our location to have everything we need within the vicinity.... In short... it takes a village."

Bridge Bookshop, Port Erin & Ramsey, Isle of Man: "It is Thursday of #IndieBookshopWeek and after all the lovely new titles were put away yesterday, I managed to take this video of how the shop in Ramsey is looking."

Griffin Books, Penarth, Wales: "A big shout out to all of our fellow indies this Independent Bookshop Week. We're so proud to be an indie, we think it's what makes us a little bit special. We see ourselves as more than just a bookshop--we are a meeting place, a safe space (for anyone and everyone who needs it), a creative hub and yes, we do also sell some lovely books. Our customers are our family.... So let's hear it for all the indie bookshops across the world who are doing amazing things in their communities!"

Bear Bookshop, Bearwood: "If you are wondering what to do this weekend of course the answer is visit a bookshop!! It’s the closing weekend of #independentbookshopweek and I know that your local booksellers would LOVE to see you."

And what does the future hold for indies? The Bookseller highlighted a "Bookseller Spotlight" from last year's IBW, in which Trish Hennessey, manager of Halfway Up the Stairs, Greystones, Ireland, noted that the bookshop had originally opened just months before the Covid-19 pandemic hit. "As a new business, we had to adapt quickly and the pandemic definitely brought some opportunities our way as well as a lot of stress," she recalled. "It is challenging to judge how we are doing as we have nothing 'normal' to compare to." 

If "nothing normal" is indeed still the new normal, why not celebrate? Happy Independent Bookshop Week!