SIMON & SCHUSTER

billy summers

Billy Summers

Chances are, if you’re a target of Billy Summers, two immutable truths apply: you’ll never even know what hit you, and you’re really getting what you deserve. He’s a killer for hire and the best in the business—but he’ll do the job only if the assignment is a truly bad person. But now, time is catching up with him, and Billy wants out. Before he can do that though, there’s one last hit, which promises a generous payday at the end of the line even as things don’t seem quite on the level here. Given that Billy is among the most talented snipers in the world, a decorated Iraq war vet, and a virtual Houdini when it comes to vanishing after the job is done, what could possibly go wrong? How about everything.

Part war story and part love letter to small-town America and the people who live there, this spectacular thriller of luck, fate, and love will grip readers with its electrifying narrative, as a complex antihero with one last shot at redemption must avenge the crimes of an extraordinarily evil man. You won’t ever forget this stunning novel from master storyteller Stephen King…and you will never forget Billy.

better than the movies

Better Than The Movies

Perfect for fans of Kasie West and Jenn Bennett, this “sweet and funny” (Kerry Winfrey, author of Waiting for Tom Hanks) teen rom-com follows a hopelessly romantic teen girl and her cute yet obnoxious neighbor as they scheme to get her noticed by her untouchable crush.

Perpetual daydreamer Liz Buxbaum gave her heart to Michael a long time ago. But her cool, aloof forever crush never really saw her before he moved away. Now that he’s back in town, Liz will do whatever it takes to get on his radar—and maybe snag him as a prom date—even befriend Wes Bennet.

The annoyingly attractive next-door neighbor might seem like a prime candidate for romantic comedy fantasies, but Wes has only been a pain in Liz’s butt since they were kids. Pranks involving frogs and decapitated lawn gnomes do not a potential boyfriend make. Yet, somehow, Wes and Michael are hitting it off, which means Wes is Liz’s in.

But as Liz and Wes scheme to get Liz noticed by Michael so she can have her magical prom moment, she’s shocked to discover that she likes being around Wes. And as they continue to grow closer, she must reexamine everything she thought she knew about love—and rethink her own ideas of what Happily Ever After should look like.

chip war: the fight for the world's most critical technology

Chip War: The Fight For the World's Most Critical Technology

***Winner of the Financial Times Business Book of the Year award***

'Pulse quickening. A nonfiction thriller - equal parts The China Syndrome and Mission Impossible' New York Times

An epic account of the decades-long battle to control the world's most critical resource—microchip technology

Power in the modern world - military, economic, geopolitical - is built on a foundation of computer chips. America has maintained its lead as a superpower because it has dominated advances in computer chips and all the technology that chips have enabled. (Virtually everything runs on chips: cars, phones, the stock market, even the electric grid.) Now that edge is in danger of slipping, undermined by the naïve assumption that globalising the chip industry and letting players in Taiwan, Korea and Europe take over manufacturing serves America's interests. Currently, as Chip War reveals, China, which spends more on chips than any other product, is pouring billions into a chip-building Manhattan Project to catch up to the US.

In Chip War economic historian Chris Miller recounts the fascinating sequence of events that led to the United States perfecting chip design, and how faster chips helped defeat the Soviet Union (by rendering the Russians’ arsenal of precision-guided weapons obsolete). The battle to control this industry will shape our future. China spends more money importing chips than buying oil, and they are China's greatest external vulnerability as they are fundamentally reliant on foreign chips. But with 37 per cent of the global supply of chips being made in Taiwan, within easy range of Chinese missiles, the West's fear is that a solution may be close at hand.

'A riveting history. Features vivid accounts and colourful characters' Financial Times

'Fascinating…A historian by training, Miller walks the reader through decades of semiconductor history – a subject that comes to life thanks to [his] use of colorful anecdotes' Forbes

'Indispensable' Niall Ferguson

elon musk

Elon Musk

1 New York Times bestseller

From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter.

When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.

His father’s impact on his psyche would linger. He developed into a tough yet vulnerable man-child, prone to abrupt Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings, with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive.

At the beginning of 2022—after a year marked by SpaceX launching thirty-one rockets into orbit, Tesla selling a million cars, and him becoming the richest man on earth—Musk spoke ruefully about his compulsion to stir up dramas. “I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode, which it has been for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life,” he said.

It was a wistful comment, not a New Year’s resolution. Even as he said it, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter, the world’s ultimate playground. Over the years, whenever he was in a dark place, his mind went back to being bullied on the playground. Now he had the chance to own the playground.

For two years, Isaacson shadowed Musk, attended his meetings, walked his factories with him, and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and adversaries. The result is the revealing inside story, filled with amazing tales of triumphs and turmoil, that addresses the question: are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress?

bộ dork diaries: tales from a not-so-posh paris adventure (volume 15)

Dork Diaries: Tales From A Not-So-Posh Paris Adventure (Volume 15)

Nikki Maxwell deals with the trials and triumphs of middle school in this fifteenth installment of the 1 New York Times bestselling Dork Diaries series!

Ooh la la! Nikki Maxwell and her band are on their way to Paris, but they run into some roadblocks on the way… And Nikki’s French skills may not be as reliable as she hoped! Can she get them moving again in time to reach their destination?

burn book - a tech love story

Burn Book - A Tech Love Story

Instant New York Times Bestseller

From award-winning journalist Kara Swisher comes a witty, scathing, but fair accounting of the tech industry and its founders who wanted to change the world but broke it instead.

“Swisher, the bad-ass journalist and OG chronicler of Silicon Valley…takes no prisoners in this highly readable look at the evolution of the digital world…Bawdy, brash, and compulsively thought-provoking, just like its author, Burn Book sizzles” (Booklist, starred review).

Part memoir, part history, Burn Book is a necessary chronicle of tech’s most powerful players. From “the queen of all media” (Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal), this is the inside story we’ve all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world.

When tech titans crowed that they would “move fast and break things,” Kara Swisher was moving faster and breaking news. While covering the explosion of the digital sector in the early 1990s, she developed a long track record of digging up and reporting the facts about this new world order. Her consistent scoops drove one CEO to accuse her of “listening in the heating ducts” and prompted Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg to once observe: “It is a constant joke in the Valley when people write memos for them to say, ‘I hope Kara never sees this.’”

While still in college, Swisher got her start at The Washington Post, where she became one of the few people in journalism interested in covering the nascent Internet. She went on to work for The Wall Street Journal, joining with Walt Mossberg to start the groundbreaking D: All Things Digital conference, as well as pioneering tech news sites.

Swisher has interviewed everyone who matters in tech over three decades, right when they presided over an explosion of world-changing innovation that has both helped and hurt our world. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, Bob Iger, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Meg Whitman, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg are just a few whom Swisher made sweat—figuratively and, in Zuckerberg’s case, literally.

Despite the damage she chronicles, Swisher remains optimistic about tech’s potential to help solve problems and not just create them. She calls upon the industry to make better, more thoughtful choices, even as a new set of powerful AI tools are poised to change the world yet again. At its heart, this book is a love story to, for, and about tech from someone who knows it better than anyone.

the holy grail of investing

The Holy Grail Of Investing

Tony Robbins returns with the final book in his financial freedom trilogy by unveiling the power of alternative investments. Robbins, and renowned investor Christopher Zook, take you on a journey to interview a dozen of the world’s most successful investors in private equity, private credit, private real estate, and venture capital. They share their favorite strategies and insights in this practical guidebook.

For decades, trillions of dollars in “smart money” has been making outsized returns using private equity, private credit, venture capital and other alternative investments. Robbins teams up with renowned private equity investor Christopher Zook, founder of CAZ Investments, to sit down with more than a dozen of the world’s greatest alternative investment managers, collectively managing over half a trillion dollars on behalf of investors. Names like…

Robert F. Smith – Founder of Vista Equity Partners, Smith is the considered the most successful enterprise software investor of all time.

Vinod Khosla – Founder of Khosla Ventures, Vinod Khosla is considered a legend in Venture Capital. He is famous for turning a $4 million investment into a $7 billion windfall for his investors.

Michael B. Kim – The “Godfather of Private Equity” in Asia, Kim has created the largest private equity firm in Asia. His astounding success for investors has also made him South Korea’s wealthiest man.

these are the plunderers

These Are The Plunderers

A Wall Street Journal Bestseller

Pulitzer Prize–winning and New York Times bestselling financial journalist Gretchen Morgenson and financial policy analyst Joshua Rosner investigate the insidious world of private equity in this “masterpiece of investigative journalism” (Christopher Leonard, bestselling author of Kochland)—revealing how it puts our entire economy and us at risk.

Much has been written about the widening gulf between rich and poor and how our style of capitalism has failed to provide a living wage for so many Americans. But nothing has fully detailed the outsized role a small cohort of elite financiers has played in this inequality. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author Gretchen Morgenson, with coauthor Joshua Rosner, unmask the small group of celebrated Wall Street financiers, and their government enablers, who use excessive debt and dubious practices to undermine our nation’s economy for their own enrichment: private equity.

These Are the Plunderers traces the thirty-year history of corporate takeovers in America and private equity’s increasing dominance. Morgenson and Rosner investigate some of the biggest names in private equity, exposing how they buy companies, load them with debt, and then bleed them of assets and profits. All while prosecutors and regulators stand idly by.

The authors show how companies absorbed by private equity have worse outcomes for everyone but the financiers: employees are more likely to lose their jobs or their benefits; companies are more likely to go bankrupt; patients are more likely to have higher healthcare costs; residents of nursing homes are more likely to die faster; towns struggle when private equity buys their main businesses, crippling the local economy; and school teachers, firefighters, medical technicians, and other public workers are more likely to have lower returns on their pensions because of the fees private equity extracts from their investments. In other words: we are all worse off because of private equity.

These Are the Plunderers is a “meticulous and devastating takedown of a powerful force in Western capitalism” (Brad Stone, bestselling author of Amazon Unbound) that exposes the greed and pillaging in private equity, revealing the many ways these billionaires have bled the economy, and, in turn, us.

fair shake

Fair Shake

A stirring, comprehensive look at the state of women in the workforce—why women’s progress has stalled, how our economy fosters unproductive competition, and how we can fix the system that holds women back.

In an era of supposed great equality, women are still falling behind in the workplace. Even with more women in the workforce than in decades past, wage gaps continue to increase. It is the most educated women who have fallen the furthest behind. Blue-collar women hold the most insecure and badly paid jobs in our economy. And even as we celebrate high-profile representation—women on the board of Fortune 500 companies and our first female vice president—women have limited recourse when they experience harassment and discrimination.

Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy explains that the system that governs our economy—a winner-take-all economy—is the root cause of these myriad problems. The WTA economy self-selects for aggressive, cutthroat business tactics, which creates a feedback loop that sidelines women. The authors, three legal scholars, call this feedback loop “the triple bind”: if women don’t compete on the same terms as men, they lose; if women do compete on the same terms as men, they’re punished more harshly for their sharp elbows or actual misdeeds; and when women see that they can’t win on the same terms as men, they take themselves out of the game (if they haven’t been pushed out already). With odds like these stacked against them, it’s no wonder women feel like, no matter how hard they work, they can’t get ahead.

Fair Shake is not a “fix the woman” book; it’s a “fix the system” book. It not only diagnoses the problem of what's wrong with the modern economy, but shows how, with awareness and collective action, we can build a truly just economy for all.

soulbbatical

Soulbbatical

Part memoir, part manifesto, Soulbbatical is an invitation to become Chief Soul Officer of your own life—and to open up a whole new world of possibility.

Former Harley-Davidson executive Shelley Paxton walked away at the peak of her twenty-six-year marketing career and embarked on a profoundly personal journey to reconnect with her true purpose and deepest desires. Her “Soulbbatical,” not only changed her life, it became her calling.

Paxton had a wildly successful life by most definitions—iconic brands, executive titles, and a globe-trotting career that took her to over sixty countries. She had one of the coolest jobs in the world yet couldn’t shake the feeling that she had lost something along the way. Something was missing.

In Soulbbatical, Shelley shares the sometimes harrowing, often hilarious journey through the illness, divorce, addiction, and tragedy that finally woke her up. Suddenly she was rebelling for her best life and embracing a new mission: to encourage others to live their most authentic, courageous, and purposeful lives—today.

This “honest, emotionally gut-wrenching, and ultimately soul-satisfying” (Kirkus Reviews) book is an unconventional, exhilarating, and deeply personal road map to discovering what you really want—and getting it. Because no matter how far you’ve strayed from your soul’s true path, it’s never too late for transformation.