It's official: private equity firm KKR is buying Simon & Schuster from Paramount Global, which first put the publisher up for sale more than three years ago. KKR, also known as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., is paying $1.62 billion in cash. The deal is subject to government regulatory review, which ultimately sank Penguin Random House's attempt to buy S&S for $2.2 billion, but that is unlikely to affect a KKR purchase. After closing, S&S, the third largest trade publisher in the U.S., will become a standalone private company and continue to be led by president and CEO Jonathan Karp and COO and CFO Dennis Eulau.

Other bidders this year for S&S included News Corporation, which owns HarperCollins and the Wall Street Journal, and investor Richard Hurowitz, who was backed by the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund manager. While the $1.65 billion price for S&S is significantly lower than PRH's offer of $2.2 billion, PRH had to pay a $200 million termination fee when its deal collapsed, and S&S has done well lately: in 2022, sales rose 19%, to $1.18 billion, and operating profit rose 16%, to $248 million.

KKR said that besides investing "in all areas necessary to establish Simon & Schuster as a standalone entity," it will also "support numerous growth initiatives, including extending Simon & Schuster's strong domestic publishing program across various genres and categories, expanding its distribution relationships and accelerating growth in international markets."

In addition, KKR plans to create "a broad-based equity ownership program" at S&S "to provide all of the company's more than 1,600 employees the opportunity to participate in the benefits of ownership after the transaction closes." KKR said that since 2011, its "portfolio companies have awarded billions of dollars of total equity value to over 60,000 non-management employees across more than 30 companies."

Jonathan Karp

S&S's Jonathan Karp said in a memo to staff, in part, that he is "delighted" with the sale, citing KKR's media and entertainment industry team's "acumen"; the equity ownership program for staff; and the background of KKR chairman of media Richard Sarnoff, a former Random House and Bertelsmann executive as well as former chairman of the Association of American Publishers.

About KKR, Karp said, "in the spring of 2023, we began a series of fascinating and stimulating conversations with members of KKR's Media and Entertainment industry team about every aspect of our business, reflective of their keen interest in acquiring our company. All of us from Simon & Schuster who participated came away from those conversations impressed by KKR's acumen, as well as their team's desire to help our business grow and thrive in the future."

He also highlighted KKR's equity ownership program, saying, "Of all the prospective buyers we spoke to--and there were a lot of them--KKR was the only one that discussed its plans to support Simon & Schuster in creating an equity ownership program to provide all of our employees with the opportunity to participate in the benefits of ownership after the transaction closes. I'm looking forward to sharing those plans after the transaction is complete."

Richard Sarnoff

Noting that he has "known and admired" Sarnoff for two decades, Karp wrote, "Before joining KKR, Richard was executive v-p and chief financial officer at Random House, where we both worked. Richard understands the nuances of the book business as well as anyone I know. The Simon & Schuster team has enjoyed meeting Richard's colleagues Ted Oberwager, Anne Arlinghaus, Chresten Knaff, Glenda Chan, David Hua, and Kate San, all of whom devoted countless hours to analyzing the intricacies of our business."

Karp concluded: "As I've noted before, in our 99-year history, Simon & Schuster has had seven owners. From these transformations we have always emerged stronger, with each new challenge incorporating the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship that infused the vision of our founders, and our constant commitment to excellence in publishing. With KKR's support, we can look forward to benefiting from their experience in helping companies to grow, and to new strategies and opportunities that will enhance our ability to provide authors with the best possible publication they can receive."

Ted Oberwager, a KKR partner who leads the gaming, entertainment, media and sports divisions in KKR's Americas Private Equity business, said, "Simon & Schuster's nearly 100-year history is a testament to the enduring value of creative expression through the written and spoken word. We are thrilled to invest behind Jon and the immensely talented organization at Simon & Schuster to support their mission of delivering marquee content to readers around the world."

Richard Sarnoff added, "We see a compelling opportunity to help Simon & Schuster become an even stronger partner to literary talent by investing in the expansion of the company's capabilities and distribution networks across mediums and markets while maintaining its 99-year legacy of editorial independence. We also believe the opportunity to create an ownership culture within one of the world's top publishers has enormous potential to create value for all of Simon & Schuster's stakeholders."

Sarnoff told the Wall Street Journal "we believe in the value of a 99-year-old enterprise that has proven itself to be a successful arbiter of culture, and a successful promoter of the best writers."

War on Books opened a bricks-and-mortar location earlier this spring at 425 Campbell Avenue Southwest, B04, in Roanoke, Va. The Roanoker reported that writer and editor Angelo Colavita "has spent the better part of his adult life involved in the bookselling business. Originally from Philadelphia, he worked at six different bookstores before moving to Roanoke and founding War on Books, a mobile shop that specializes in selling independent, radical literature with the goal of bringing new and underrepresented ideas to light."

Colavita said his shop has always been about providing a sanctuary for the community to explore literature that can help them garner knowledge that empowers them to challenge widely accepted ideologies and to spark important conversations. "I've seen a six-foot folding table with a few crates of books become a safe place for leftists and right-wingers to interact, to ask questions of each other that maybe, for whatever reason, they felt unable to ask under other circumstances. They've told me so," he said. 

He also noted the atmosphere created by the bookshop's location, a compact, half-underground basement: "Even some of the lighting in the common area has total bomb shelter vibes. Kinda fits in with War on Books' 'underfunded Cold War program' aesthetic, right?"

Colavita plans to continue featuring the store's pop-ups. The new space is home to War on Bookclubs, which meets monthly, and will also soon be the gathering place for A Page Against the Machine, a writing workshop guided by Colavita that will "help you turn your political tirades into refined, meaningful works of literature." 

He added: "This is as much a personal journey of discovery and expression through art and writing as it is a direct, militant, antifascist effort as it is a cool place to just hang out and meet people as it is a retail shop. I can't wait to see how far I can take it, honestly."

The Sequel Bookshop's current store.

The Sequel Bookshop, Kearney, Neb., is moving to a new space in the Hilltop Mall at 5011 2nd Ave. Ste 51. In an e-mail announcement, owner Lisa Neuheisel noted: "We have been asked to vacate our space. We have worked closely with mall ownership to secure another suite in the Hilltop Mall. We are relocating to the suite south of Maurices. Fun Fact: I started my very first job in this same location in 1988... read all about it! Bookstore (I am in the Dr. Seuss hat.).... This summer will be our 13th Anniversary and we hope you will follow us to our new location. Thank you, Kearney!"

Currently, the Sequel Bookshop is transitioning to its new space. The bookstore's current space will close Friday, August 11, to move inventory. Plans call for remaining closed for at least five days.

Alan Roland, who "brought new insights to psychoanalysis by calling out a Western bias in much of the field and factoring in differences in culture and upbringing among patients," died July 22, the New York Times reported. He was 93. 

Roland was best known for In Search of Self in India and Japan: Toward a Cross-Cultural Psychology (1988), an influential book in which he laid out his ideas. The Times noted that a crucial moment in the evolution of those ideas came in 1971, when he was teaching at the New School in New York and a man from India sought him out for therapy.

"I was immediately struck in those therapy sessions that the quality of his mind was of a different cast than that of any American patient I had ever worked with," Roland wrote, citing as an example the familial relationships and expectations the man had grown up with and how they differed from what he was encountering in the West.

Roland ultimately lived for significant periods in India and Japan. "I came to see the psychological makeup of persons in societies so civilizationally different as India, Japan, and America as embedded in the fundamentally distinct cultural principles of these civilizations and the social patterns and child-rearing that these principles shape," he wrote, adding: "This is quite different from the many psychoanalysts who tend to assume the primacy of psychic reality and believe that psychology determines culture and society--another form of psychoanalytic reductionism."

In a eulogy delivered at Roland's memorial service recently, New York psychoanalyst M. Nasir Ilahi, who was a student in the 1970s when he first encountered Roland in his seminar on cross-cultural psychoanalysis, said, "It turned out to be a momentous and in some respects a life-changing experience for me, as for the first time I found someone articulating, in a way that made sense, the not so easy to grasp psychological differences between individuals from the radically different cultures of North America and that of my own South Asia."

Roland's other books included Cultural Pluralism and Psychoanalysis: The Asian and North American Experience (1996) and Journeys to Foreign Selves: Asians and Asian Americans in a Global Era (2011). 

Roland also wrote plays and sometimes wrote psychoanalytic interpretations of plays by others. He was an artist whose watercolors and etchings appeared in numerous group shows and in several solo exhibitions. He saw connections between his artistic endeavors and his clinical practice.

Online friends and debut novelists Ben Purkert (The Men Can't Be Saved; The Overlook Press) and Ruth Madievsky (All Night Pharmacy; Catapult) met in person for the first time at their joint--and packed--launch event at Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Mass.

"Step into your happy place where escape is just a page away," Little City Books, Hoboken, N.J., posted on Facebook.

"Bookstores are the best form of sunblock" was the sidewalk chalkboard message shared by pages: a bookstore, Manhattan Beach, Cailf., on Instagram recently. The bookshop added: "Books and bookstores are GREAT sun block!! And it's cool inside the shop. What are you reading on this bright sunny day? Thanks @vahibooks for the inspo."

There's a Yeti in My Tummy by Meredith Rusu, illustrated by Martín Morón (4U2B Books & Media).

Today:
Fresh Air: Andrew Leland, author of The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight (Penguin Press, $29, 9781984881427).

Tomorrow:
Today Show: Jay "Jeezy" Jenkins, author of Adversity for Sale: Ya Gotta Believe (HarperCollins, $29.99, 9781400236251).

Tamron Hall repeat: Jazmyn Simon and Dulé Hill, authors of Repeat After Me: Big Things to Say Every Day (Random House Books for Young Readers, $18.99, 9780593426975).

Robert Sindelar, managing partner of Third Place Books, with three stores in Seattle, Wash., and Dan Christiaens, longtime West Coast sales rep for W.W. Norton, have banded together to produce, direct, and star in a production of Samuel Beckett's classic Waiting for Godot. In addition to the two bookseller lead actors, the part of Lucky will be performed by Whidbey Island librarian Gabe Harshman. 

The show will open on Friday, September 8, at Outcast Productions in Langley, Wash., on Whidbey Island, and run on weekends through September 24. Advance ticket purchases are highly recommended and will go on sale today, August 8, online.

The play was originally produced in Paris at the Theatre de Babylone, opening on January 5, 1953. The English language version premiered in London in 1955 and is now considered "the most significant English language play of the 20th century." This production celebrates the 70th anniversary of the play while also shining a light on its contemporary relevance.

A longlist has been released for the 2023 Cundill History Prize, which honors "the book that embodies historical scholarship, originality, literary quality and broad appeal" and is administered by McGill University in Montreal, Canada. The shortlist will be announced September 27 and a winner named November 8. The winner receives $75,000 and the two runners up $10,000 each. Check out this year's longlisted titles here.

James Beard Award-winning food writer Kim Foster ("The Dysfunction of Food") expands on her previous essays in The Meth Lunches, a memoir that takes readers on a precarious culinary journey through addiction, poverty, and the U.S. foster care system against the backdrop of the bright lights and desert landscape of Las Vegas.

Foster and her husband moved from New York City to Las Vegas with their two young daughters, surprising themselves by falling in love with their arid new home. Foster even loves their downtown grocery store, which her neighbors would gladly trade for a Whole Foods. She enmeshes her family in the community largely through feeding people, and along the way, she sees a variety of intersections between food and poverty. "What we are eating and how we are eating tells us something integral about how we are doing, what our lives are like," she realizes.

The Fosters learn about the nearly inescapable grasp of meth addiction from Charlie, a day laborer they hire and get to know through daily lunches together. Foster lives her dream of serving as a foster parent and becomes intimately acquainted with the profound mental effects of starvation on children through her adopted son, whose early experiences leave him with the impulse to both refuse and hoard food. She runs a neighborhood food pantry during the Covid-19 pandemic, giving rise to a micro-community that highlights the best and worst human impulses. Through the pantry, Foster meets an unhoused woman who grows produce in her van. She outlines the entanglement of food, dignity, and individualism, the lack of humanity in many institutionalized food aid programs, and the creativity that allows food to make people feel human in inhumane places.

Foster unflinchingly lays bare the reality of poverty and hunger in America, combining statistics with the true life stories of people in her own sphere. Prejudice, predatory housing practices, and poor access to care for people with severe mental illnesses all rise into sharp, frustrating relief. Foster may occasionally be guilty of saviorism, but she also freely admits it, and acknowledges her past biases as well as her personal growth. She openly discusses her own mental health and the limits of her focus. Her meditations on community and caring for others encourage readers to consider the building of a world where everyone has a place at a full, loving table. Book clubs should relish this call to action. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Shelf Talker: James Beard Award-winner Kim Foster examines food and poverty in the U.S. through the lens of Las Vegas, Nev., her own community.

The bestselling self-published books last week as compiled by IndieReader.com:

1. Twisted Love by Ana Huang
2. A Game of Gods by Scarlett St Clair
3. Beyond High Performance by Jason Jaggard
4. Twisted Games by Ana Huang
5. Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton
6. Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins
7. Hooked by Emily McIntire
8. A Soul of Ash and Blood by Jennifer L. Armentrout
9. The Perfect Marriage by Jeneva Rose
10. Twisted Hate by Ana Huang

[Many thanks to IndieReader.com!]