Fountain Bookstore Events Meetup

Wilbert is the author of our most recent non-fiction pick for the First Editions Club! He'll be at the store for a meet-and-greet and signing, so come by and say hello!
You do not need to RSVP for this event, but you're welcome to reserve a book here: https://www.fountainbookstore.com/item/f10yIDkbWsuRWyOQhQgMPw
About the Book:
Both an epic history and an intimate family story, a startling account of the lives of Black cops in one Midwestern city.
Amid the fervent protests over police killings in 2020, the reporter Wilbert L. Cooper returned to his hometown of Cleveland to profile the president of a Black police organization called the Black Shield. The group had aligned itself with activists calling for reform, but its president was notorious for having shot a young unarmed Black man years earlier. As Cooper explored the question of whether Black cops can create the kind of radical changes in policing that Black people are calling for, he was also welcomed by the members of the group in a different, more complicated capacity: as Sergeant Will Cooper’s son.
For Cooper, this assignment was personal. His parents are retired Black Cleveland cops; his sister was a Cleveland cop; on his mother’s side, there has been a Cleveland cop in the family since 1950. In unearthing the dramatic histories of the Black Shield and his own family, Cooper tells the intertwined stories of the two: his relatives, whose lineage traces back to the Great Migration and who chose policing because it was one of the few stepping stones to economic security and status in a segregated city; and an organization that, over decades of cultural and political upheaval, has cycled endlessly between rebellion and acquiescence.
An intimate, bold work of literary nonfiction, The Black Shield is an urgent exploration of the complex duality of the Black cop. Cooper grapples with a knot of contradictions: Is the Black officer a sign of progressive change, or of a system that shifts its appearance without changing its outcomes? How to reconcile the fact that policing helped lift his family out of poverty while it has kept its knee on the necks of his people? Fearless and singularly powerful, The Black Shield gives us an American story about race and power that has never been told before.
About the Author:
Wilbert L. Cooper grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. He studied journalism at Ohio University an earned a master's degree in publishing at New York University. He has written for outlets such as The Guardian, The New York Times, the Marshall Project, and The Wall Street Journal. His Vice documentary The Cleveland Strangler was nominated for a National Magazine Award. In 2024, he was the recipient of the Richard J. Margolis Award. The Black Shield is his first book.

Ed Burns will be at the store for a meet-and-greet and signing on Saturday, September 26th!
You do not need to RSVP to the event but you can preorder a copy to have ready for pickup here: https://www.fountainbookstore.com/item/kJGRmM40TbeW7f8SvMOeAA
About the Book:
A teenager’s idyllic summer of freedom is shaded by the growing weight of responsibility and a recognition of the fallibility of the adults around him.
Actor and director Ed Burns returns with the continuing fictionalized saga of growing up on Marlboro Road.
In this his second Marlboro Road novel, Edward Burns continues the tale, loosely based on his own childhood. The Guardian called Burns’s first novel, A Kid from Marlboro Road, “keenly felt…vivid…a tender-hearted complement to the Irish-American stories that Burns captures in his films.” The boy that was twelve in the first novel is now fourteen, about to turn fifteen, when he will enter an all-boys Catholic High School. He spends a lot more time with his best friends, Mark, T-Mac, Zeppo, Louie and Cakes than he does with his given family.
But for all their newfound freedom, the kids find the larger world of Valley Stream and the neighboring towns a more dangerous place than they’re prepared for, where dads can hurt you when they reveal their own emotional scars and the local beach might be ruled by gangs of older kids you might have to defend yourself from. In this larger world our narrator starts to see even his own family as not so perfect.
The Marlboro Road Gang is a novel where darker currents start to invade the innocent pastorale of childhood, and where a boy might lose his bearings in the confusion.
About the Author:
Born in Woodside, Queens and raised on Long Island, EDWARD BURNS has made fourteen feature films as a writer-director-actor and starred in many films, including Saving Private Ryan. Burns’ first film The Brothers McMullen, premiered at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, winning the Grand Jury prize. The film also won "Best First Feature" at the 1996 Independent Spirit Awards. In 2015, he published Independent Ed, an inside look at his two decades as a pioneer in independent filmmaking, and in 2024 he moved to Seven Stories Press for his debut novel, A Kid from Marlboro Road, projected to be the first of several novels based on his childhood memories and the local story of Irish Americans in New York City and Long Island. The Marlboro Road Gang is the second novel in the series. Burns lives in New York City with his wife and two children.