NBC News reporter Char Adams writes a deeply compelling and rigorously reported history of Black political movements, told through the lens of Black-owned bookstores, which have been centers for organizing from abolition to the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter.Black-Owned celebrates small businesses and their role in community building—and in liberation. Journalist Char Adams reports on how Black bookstores have always been centerpieces of resistance. This is a story of activism, espionage, violence, and perseverance. The first Black-owned bookstore was opened by an abolitionist in 1834. In the twentieth century, civil rights and Black Power activists started a Black bookstore boom nationwide. Malcolm X would deliver speeches at the doorstep of the National Memorial African Book Store in Harlem, a place dubbed “Speakers Corner.” Soon many bookstores became targets of the FBI and local law enforcement alike.Amid these struggles, bookshops were also places of Eartha Kitt and Langston Hughes held autograph parties at their local Black-owned bookstore and Maya Angelou even became the face of National Black Bookstore Week. Now a new generation of Black activists are joining the radical bookstore tradition, with rapper Noname opening her Radical Hood Library in Los Angeles. And several stores made national headlines in the era of the Black Lives Matter movement. Today finds Black-owned bookshops in a position of strength—and as Adams will make clear, in an era of increasing division, their presence is needed now more than ever.Populated by vibrant characters and written with cinematic flair, Black-Owned is an enlightening story of community, resistance, and joy.

How to Read Now explores the politics and ethics of reading, and insists that we are capable of something better: a more engaged relationship not just with our fiction and our art, but with our buried and entangled histories. Smart, funny, galvanizing, and sometimes profane, Castillo attacks the stale questions and less-than-critical proclamations that masquerade as vital discussion: reimagining the cartography of the classics, building a moral case against the settler colonialism of lauded writers like Joan Didion, taking aim at Nobel Prize winners and toppling indie filmmakers, and celebrating glorious moments in everything from popular TV like The Watchmen to the films of Wong Kar-wai and the work of contemporary poets like Tommy Pico. At once a deeply personal and searching history of one woman's reading life, and a wide-ranging and urgent intervention into our globalized conversations about why reading matters today, How to Read Now empowers us to embrace a more complicated, embodied form of reading, inviting us to acknowledge complicated truths, ignite surprising connections, imagine a more daring solidarity, and create space for a riskier intimacy--within ourselves, and with each other.