Cat adoption was where the store started, according to co-owner Rosie Zuckerman. 'I had been doing the cat portion of the store as a pop-up event with the Holland Project.' She had wanted to combine that project with another, to make it more permanent. 'And I had a coworker and friend at work who had … once mentioned something about wanting to open a feminist bookstore. And she was down and that's how it happened.'
The store features quite a number of book genres, says Zuckerman. 'We have a pretty sizable, general non-fiction section that's going to have history, feminist studies, gender studies, mind and body stuff, an anti-racism section, and then sort of specific sections for AAPI studies, Arab, Jewish and Middle Eastern studies, African-American and Black studies, Latinx studies, and indigenous studies.' Fiction is divided into general fiction and 'sci-fi, fantasy, and horror.'
Ilya Arbatman, also a co-owner of The Radical Cat, stressed the importance of the store as a community space, 'especially in a small community like Reno where there are not a lot of community-minded, especially kind of progressive-minded public spaces … We try to keep the space available to the community sort of as needed.'
Although they have had 128 cat adoptions, Zuckerman stresses that The Radical Cat is not a cat rescue. 'We basically operate as a like sort of foster adoption center. Currently, we're working with Options Veterinary Care, which is a nonprofit vet clinic, and they operate similar to SPCA and the Humane Society in that they'll take cats in from animal control.' Visitors to the store are welcome to visit with the cats in the store's Cat Room.
Arbatman concluded, 'The reason that this place is nice, the kind of smaller size, you know, we see it as a boon. That's not really like a limitation.'
The Radical Cat is located at 1500 South Virginia Street in Reno. More at theradicalcat.com.
This is the fourth in a series of features on independent bookstores in the greater Reno area.
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Support for 'Arts on the Airwaves' comes from The Nevada Arts Council… a state agency that provides public funding and support to artists and organizations, that benefit Nevadans in cities and rural communities statewide. More at NVArtsCouncil.org.
