Business Beat: Fourth Street Turns Page With New Bookstore
By Ashleigh Ruhl
FROM: The Grunion
A new bookstore is turning the page on Fourth Street’s Retro Row.
Page Against the Machine (or PATM) opened earlier this month in a narrow but bright retail space at 2714 E. Fourth St., the sleekly remodeled home of what was formerly Seventh Wave surf shop. Continue reading “Business Beat: Fourth Street Turns Page With New Bookstore”

Sideshow Bookstore has a lot to offer, little nooks and shelves of great reads and highly recommended staff picks, it’s the place you find instant comfort in. Tony, the owner, has undeniably created a meaningful respite for all Angelenos.
Through various events, journals and workshops, the creative writing team in the Cal State San Bernardino Department of English works hard to highlight and celebrate the diverse voices of the campus community.
If you want to understand the ceaseless gentrification of Santa Monica, just walk down Main Street.
Documenting literary Los Angeles is my lifelong project. It started early in my childhood. I grew up going to bookstores across Los Angeles. From the early 1980s, I remember my dad driving us to the Bodhi Tree on Melrose. I remember going to Acres of Books in Long Beach and many other Used Bookstores now long gone. Most of them have been gone so long that I cannot even remember their names. (I still go to the Iliad in North Hollywood.)
With her long purple dress, aqua hair, and strong spirit, Professor Bridgette Robinson walks into Santa Monica College’s (SMC) Drescher Hall 212, greets her English 1 class, and begins to read along to Asha Bandele and Patrisse Cullors’ novel “When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir.” She easily commands the attention of the room; her students sit on the edge of their seats listening.
The Free Black Women’s Library has arrived in Los Ángeles. They are the L.A. chapter of The Free Black Women’s Library, founded in Brooklyn in 2015 by Ola Ronke Akinmowo. The aim of this library is to provide “a free, feminist pop-up library and book swap with Black women writers at the center,” as their mission states.
Lucy Jane Bledso
Pasadena Native Naomi Hirahara and L.A. native Walter Mosley have both been nominated for a 2019 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original, Hiroshima Boy, and Best Novel, Down The River Unto The Sea, respectively. For Hirahara it’s her second Edgar Award nomination, her first being for Snakeskin Shamisen, which won the 2007 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original. Mosely has been nominated twice before for Best Novel, in 1993 for White Butterfly and in 2013 for All I did Was Shoot My Man and was nominated for Best First Novel in 1991 for Devil in a Blue Dress.
Literary editor of of Los Ángeles based Harriet Tubman Press, Shonda Buchanan announced the release of her next book Black Indian: A Memoir, will be released by Wayne State Press in August. She is also an award-winning poet and educator. She is the author of Who’s Afraid of Black Indians? and Equipoise: Poems from Goddess Country and editor of two anthologies, Voices from Leimert Park and Voices from Leimert Park Redux.