Collection Development "Urban Fiction": Streetwise Urban Fiction
By David Wright -- Library Journal, 7/15/2006
One of the hottest literary phenomena of recent years has been the explosion of what has been variously termed hip-hop, street, or urban fiction. Especially popular with younger African Americans, books in this genre are reaching an increasingly broad readership through ties to hip-hop music and culture. These crime stories generally revolve around the often tragic choices and journeys of young women and men drawn by the lure of easy money into drugs, prostitution, and the thug life. Street lit readers place a high premium on authenticity, and many of the genre's writers have firsthand experience of the gangsta life, not a few starting their writing careers as a way of coping while in prison and a means of going legit once they get out.
There is often plenty of glamour amidst the grit, however, and if the genre can be traced back to the bleak, autobiographical ghetto novels of Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim, they are also the progeny of the materialistic sex-and-shopping novels of Jackie Collins and the bravura crime family sagas of Mario Puzo. Characterized by badass attitude and rendered in the evolving language of the streets, these high-stakes dramas offer plenty of explicit sex and frequent violence. As a reviewer at Salon.com put it, “The three things most commonly exchanged by [the genre's] characters are profanities, gunfire and bodily fluids.”
Indeed, what distinguishes street stories from other contemporary African American literature is their emphasis on crime, drugs, and a cold, hard look at the less savory side of the street. These books speak in the voices of rappers, players, and gangstas, where the “n-word” has passed from abusive epithet to defiant honorific to the merest pronoun. In walling off his gritty street stories (e.g., Cold Blooded; Dark Thirst) behind the pseudonym the Urban Griot, Omar Tyree highlights both the similarities and the differences between his upscale urban dramas (and those of Eric Jerome Dickey and Karen Quinones Miller, for instance) and the more hard-core tales of Teri Woods and Nikki Turner. As African American fiction continues to grow and diversify into a broad spectrum, it is important to recognize that many of the readers eagerly awaiting the next prison-penned fable of a pimp and his girl are not necessarily interested in what's new from Yolanda Joe or Zane.
An underlying moral
It comes as no surprise that street lit's popularity, especially with the young, has proven controversial. But the underlying message is not as simple as some critics think. While characterized by its refusal to preach, this genre often presents cautionary tales freighted with the conviction of those who have done the crime—and the time. Even the most unrepentantly fabulous ghetto crime capers are intensely moral, suffused with the code of the street and the dire consequences of hubris and offering much the same perp's-eye view of life as noir fiction and gangster films. These books' appeal as outlaw fables cannot be underestimated and helps account for their phenomenal success with younger readers interested in challenging dominant cultural norms. Yet to the extent that many of the genre's fans face choices similar to those of its characters, these books also deliver on their promise to tell it like it is, reflecting the often discomfiting reality of a society addicted to money and drugs and at war with itself along racially drawn lines.
For libraries, the message is loud and clear: street lit is creating huge numbers of new readers. Although these readers range across the socioeconomic spectrum, from prisons to college campuses, many of them tell us repeatedly that if it weren't for street lit, they probably wouldn't be much interested in books. The goal of promoting literacy is so central to the mission of every public library that for us to fail these new and emerging readers by ignoring this living literature goes beyond a disservice—it is practically a sacrilege.
Off the street and into libraries
That said, getting the fiction of the streets onto our shelves can be a challenge, even with the increasing publicity it has received lately. Fueled by the growing affordability of self-publishing and the web's supercharged word of mouth, this genre has emerged from underground as a virtual conspiracy between writers and readers, with new authors and publishers cropping up almost weekly. And mainstream publishers and media are finally starting to pay attention. Yet these books continue to flourish largely under most libraries' radar.
Librarians have been slow to purchase street lit for a number of reasons, including unfamiliarity or discomfort with the genre and the absence of reliable reviews. In addition, financially strapped libraries may be reluctant to buy books that tend to walk out the door. While each library must develop its own approach to acquiring high-loss items like street lit, it is important to recall that our collections are for use, and it doesn't take many circulations to squeeze our dollars' worth out of a trade paperback. Libraries wishing to remain relevant to patrons devoted to street lit may need to take an aggressive, almost serials-based approach to stocking it. Here are some tactics and resources that should help you to get educated about this genre and prove useful in developing and maintaining a collection that your patrons will say is off the chain!
Whose best sellers?
Money talks, and its voice in the African American community can be heard in alternative best sellers lists such as the Essence Bestsellers, which surveys several independent black booksellers and where the hottest urban titles are always in evidence, and at Cushcity and the African American Literature Book Club, two longstanding online retailers with many useful resources and links.
No collection is complete without a healthy supply of titles by the genre's godfathers, Goines and Robert “Iceberg Slim” Beck. Both of these ghetto fiction mainstays, together with other old-school writers, can be found at Holloway House, a publisher focusing on the black experience. Although in less demand than Goines and Slim, other gritty urban classics, such as Roland Jefferson's nightmarish thriller The School on 103rd Street (Norton. 1997. ISBN 0-393-31662-9. pap. $11), the ultrableak Harlem crime stories of Chester Himes, such as Blind Man with a Pistol (Vintage. 1989. ISBN 0-394-75998-2. pap. $12), or William Attaway's feverish story of the black diaspora, Blood on the Forge (New York Review Bks. 2005. ISBN 1-59017-134-9. pap. $14 ), can help to add depth to the collection and historical context to today's trendy titles.
This fall, Snoop Dogg is slated to publish his first novel, Love Don't Live Here No More (Atria: S. & S. ISBN 0-7432-7363-X. $24.95), and next year rapper 50 Cent will be adding books to his G-Unit line of shoes and apparel. Hip-hop music and literature share a fertile common ground, so get hooked up to hip-hop culture at large through such magazines as Vibe and The Source, as well as web sites such as AllHipHop and Support Online Hip Hop.
Go to the source
New street lit publishers and imprints come and go with alarming rapidity, but a number of major players have emerged that you should know. These include Vickie Stringer's Triple Crown Publications, one of the first independents and still going strong; Carl Weber's Kensington-distributed Urban Books, which recently took another step forward in its street lit dominance when it acquired both United Brothers Books and Q-Boro Books; and Melodrama Publishing. Urban fiction imprints at some of the major houses are Kensington Books' Dafina and Simon & Schuster's Strebor Books. St. Martin's Griffin paperback imprint has also been aggressively acquiring talent from smaller houses and off the streets, having just signed a six-book deal with that epitome of literary hustlers, Relentless Aaron (www.relentlessaaron.com), who penned over a score of titles during his time behind bars. [His first Griffin novel, Extra Marital Affairs (ISBN 0-312-35935-7. pap. $14.95), will be published in September.] These and many other small presses and self-published authors can be found at C&B Books Distribution (www.cbbooksdistribution.com).
Get connected
Largely neglected by mainstream media, street lit has evolved its own alternative network for reviews, discussion, and marketing. In addition to more established African American review outlets such as Black Issues Book Review (bibookreview.com) and QBR: The Black Book Review (www.qbr.com), popular grass-roots web sites such as R.A.W. Sistaz (www.therawreviewers.com/index_sample.shtml) and Urban Book Reviews (www.urban-reviews.com) have stepped up to fill the gap. As with many genres, readers can chime in with their own views and reviews on sites such as Thumper's Corner (www.thumperscorner.com), Coast2Coast Readers (www.coast2coastreaders.com), and Essence forums (www.essence.com/essence/books). Amazon.com remains the best-known spot for readers to swap opinions, but be warned: in the bustling marketplace of street lit books, there is much love and hate doled out by entrepreneurial bootstrappers and back stabbers looking to increase their sales and cut into the competition. Honest reviewers can be judged by their track records.
What's the word?
Although online forums can be great places to learn more about this genre's appeal, there's no substitute for a face-to-face. Listen to your patrons. Ask them about what they're enjoying and where they heard about it. Remember that a single reader's request for a new author may represent just the tip of an iceberg of many patrons who will never surface at your library because they don't think you have anything that reflects their tastes and interests. Prove them wrong. Below is a sampler of titles to get you started, representing the hottest in the recent boom of independent or initially self-published authors. Starred [
] titles are essential for all collections.
Street Lit Sampler
Banks, Al-Saadiq. Caught 'em Slippin'. True2Life Prods. 2005. 348p. ISBN 0-9740610-3-4. pap. $14.95.Miranda Benderes came up easy under the protection of her Cuban crime-lord father, who gave her everything except a moral compass. When Miranda loses her father to prison, she finds herself back at the bottom, hooked up with small-time Philadelphia hood Sha-Rock and his psycho associate Killer Cal, as they make an all-or-nothing bid for mastery of the streets. Self-published writer Banks makes a cameo in this tale.
Brown, Tracy. Criminal Minded. Griffin: St. Martin's. 2005. 304p. ISBN 0-312-33646-2. pap. $14.95.
Lamin makes a mint selling crack with his buddy Zion, but then a brush with mortality sends him on a straighter path. His new plans to convert his drug profits into a career shooting music videos and a glamorous lifestyle with his girlfriend, Lucky, are thrown into doubt when his cousin Curtis gets out of jail. Staten Island author Brown populates this gritty coming-of-age story with a complex cast of characters caught up in a truly unpredictable drama with dire consequences.
Chunichi. A Gangster's Girl. Urban Bks., dist. by Kensington. 2004. 256p. ISBN 0-9743636-5-0. pap. $14.95.
Ceazia Devereaux is lured by flash and a man named Cash into the lucrative escort business, but she gives up hustling the streets and takes herself off the market when tempted by drug-dealing Vegas. Too bad she's gambling with her life. The saga continues in Married to the Game (Urban Bks. 2005. ISBN 0-9747025-9-5. pap. $14.95).
Clark, Wahida. Payback Is a Mutha. Dafina: Kensington. 2006. 240p. ISBN 0-7582-1253-4. pap. $15.
Shan and Brianna are friends 'til the end, which may be coming sooner than either of them expects. There's more than friendship on the line in this spicy urban drama about a good girl gone bad and a bad girl gone worse. Clark is currently serving time in a federal prison in West Virginia.
Ervin, Keisha. Chyna Black. Triple Crown Pubns. 2005. 259p. ISBN 0-9762349-1-2. pap. $15.
Chyna thinks she's found herself in Tyriek's easy love, but there's a thin line between love and hate, and the low road to self-respect is paved with pain. St. Louis author Ervin draws upon her own experience and the tough choices she's had to make as a teen mother to craft harrowing stories of struggle and triumph.
Holmes, Shannon. Never Go Home Again. Atria: S. & S. 2004. 336p. ISBN 0-7434-8783-4. $23.95; pap. 2005. ISBN 0-7434-9616-7. $15.
Although not a child of privilege, Corey Dixon is growing up in a comfortable home with two caring parents working hard to make a good life for him. But the lure of the streets is strong, and by his 16th birthday, the drug game has played the player, and Corey winds up in a cell on Riker's Island struggling to survive. While in prison, Corey finds a new family and fresh insights to help him face the biggest challenge of his life—getting out. Not surprisingly, Holmes has much in common with the protagonist of his third novel; his message was hard won behind bars, where his writing career began with B-More Careful (Teri Woods Pub. 2001. ISBN 0-9672249-1-8. pap. $14.95).
Jihad. Baby Girl. United Brothers. 2005. 260p. ISBN 1-893196-23-2. pap. $14.95.
Baby Girl sure wasn't born yesterday. Brought up in the streets of Atlanta by a con man named Shabazz and a wise old drunk named Ben Franklin, she has learned that in this life its all about the Benjamins, baby, and there's nothing she won't do to get ahead.
Jones, Solomon. Ride or Die. Minotaur: St. Martin's. 2004. 304p. ISBN 0-312-30616-4. $19.95; pap. 2005. ISBN 0-312-33989-5. $13.95.
Keisha and Jamal clearly love each other. Their fathers, the not-so Reverend John Anderson and Philly drug lord Frank Nichols, were once good friends. But now the two families are at war, and in their desperate pursuit of a storybook ending, the young couple must run a gangsta's gauntlet. From the author of Pipe Dream (LJ 10/1/01) and The Bridge (LJ 4/1/03).
K'wan. Hoodlum. Griffin: St. Martin's. 2005. 336p. ISBN 0-312-33308-0. pap. $14.95.
Crime families don't have black sheep, they have white ones: good kids like Michael Corleone or Shai Clark. A college basketball star disgraced for taking a piece of his own action, Shai turns to the family business that Poppa has tried to shield him from and finds that the legit world has taught him lessons that pay off on the streets. Shai and his pal Swan start living large and looking for that pot of gold at the end of the concrete rainbow. Then they meet the real competition, and the bullets fly. One of the genre's most prolific and consistently gripping authors, Harlem's K'wan Foye hit the big time after emailing Vickie Stringer for advice on his first manuscript, which became the very successful Gangsta (Triple Crown Pubns. 2002. ISBN 0-9702472-1-4. pap. $15). His latest is Eve (LJ 2/1/06).
Moore, Y. Blak. The Apostles. One World: Ballantine. 2004. 288p. ISBN 0-345-47570-4. pap. $12.95.
Notorious gang leader Solemn Shawn should have thought twice before refusing membership to Insane Wayne, who sets off a deadly game of Jack-the-giant-killer between the Apostles and a rival gang. Ready to settle down, Shawn learns that it is hard to retire when the streets are littered with the corpses of your brothers-in-arms. Former gang member Moore churns the high-octane action on every blood-soaked page.
Ptah, Heru. A Hip-Hop Story. MTV: S. & S. 2003. 416p. ISBN 0-7434-8323-5. pap. $13.95.
The feud between aspiring Bronx rap stars Flawless and Hannibal escalates to the point where words can kill. Jamaican-born Ptah's updating of West Side Story displays all the verbal inventiveness and mastery of the battling rappers who fill its pages and highlights the fluid borders between music and the street.
Souljah, Sister. The Coldest Winter Ever. Atria: S. & S. 2004. 544p. ISBN 0-7434-9938-7. $21.95; pap. Pocket. 2006. ISBN 1-4165-2169-0. $7.99.
In a clever literary device that epitomizes the genre's ambivalence about the gangsta ethos, rap star Souljah enters her own novel as a would-be mentor to set gangsta princess Winter Santiaga back on the straight and narrow but does not convince the streetwise sistah of anything. Soujah's first effort remains one of the best in the genre, an inspiration and benchmark for newer authors and a book that belongs in every library even considering collecting street lit. (LJ 4/15/99)
Stringer, Vickie. Let That Be the Reason. Triple Crown Pubns. 2001. 285p. ISBN 0-9702472-0-6. pap. $12.
Written during the last six weeks of Stringer's seven-year prison stint for drug racketeering, this fierce cautionary tale is inspired by Stringer's own descent from middle-class respectability to criminal notoriety. When the easy money from her husband's drug dealing disappears as fast as his wayward affections, Pamela goes into business as a call girl and then a madam, re-creating herself as the badass Carmen. Riding the crest of the hip-hop fiction craze, Stringer capitalized on the failure of many big publishers to recognize the audience for street stories by establishing Triple Crown Publications (named after her former drug crew) and developing many of the authors on this bibliography. Stringer's Imagine This (Atria: S. & S. 2004. ISBN 0-7434-9347-8. pap. $14) continues the story of Pamela's quest to get paid, get respect, and get right with her young son. [Her latest novel, Dirty Red, is reviewed on p. 73.—Ed.]
Turner, Nikki. Riding Dirty on I-95. One World: Ballantine. (Nikki Turner Original). 2006. 320p. ISBN 0-345-47684-0. pap. $13.95.
Left to her own devices after her father is gunned down in her youth, Mercy Jiles struggles hard to get by. But her job as concierge at the sleazy Ambassador Hotel takes her off the streets only to put her on the road as she falls in with the fast-living, big-spending traffickers who stop off in Richmond, VA, while working the East Coast drug expressway. Beginning with A Hustler's Wife (Triple Crown Pubns. 2003. 259p. ISBN 0-9702472-5-7. pap. $15), Turner's tough-yet-tender heroines have earned her considerable recognition, so that now her name (like Teri Woods's) is being used as a publisher's imprint to introduce lesser-known writers.
Whitaker, Tu-Shonda L. Flip Side of the Game. Triple Crown Pubns. 2004. 180p. ISBN 0-9747895-4-2. pap. $15.
When your cradle is a dumpster, there's nowhere to go but up, and Vera Wright-Turner wants glamour and the high life at any price. Then her love doctor, Taj, helps open her heart and unmask a hurt that may only be healed when she does right by the crack-addicted woman who abandoned her.
Williams, KaShamba. Driven: When You Can't Take Anything Else. United Brothers. 2005. 243p. ISBN 1-893196-21-6. pap. $14.95.
Nasir wants to do the right thing and end the cycle of abandonment by being the last fatherless child in his line, but what happens when his true love is not the woman who says she's had his baby and his own mother takes his baby's mama's side? To find out just how far Nasir gets driven around the bend, you'll need to read the sequel, At the Court's Mercy (Urban Bks., dist by Kensington. 2006. ISBN 1-893196-29-1. pap. $14.95). Williams also writes a series of books aimed at teen readers.
Woods, Teri. Deadly Reigns. Teri Woods Pub. 2005. 303p. ISBN 0-9672249-7-7. pap. $14.95.
In the first of a trilogy, the notorious Reigns family has eluded capture by the FBI, but can they survive their own lethal ambitions? Princess Reigns seeks to become queen of the family cocaine empire with tactics that make Lady Macbeth look like Little Orphan Annie, but her ruthless brothers—brilliant entrepreneur Damian and stone-cold psycho killer Dante—are not so easily overcome. Things take a crazy turn when a sexy federal agent arrives on the scene, working undercover and under the covers. One of the original self-publishing success stories in street lit, Woods was already selling copies of her first novel, True to the Game (Teri Woods Pub. 1999. ISBN 0-9672249-0-X. pap. $14.95), on the streets from the back of her car as Sister Souljah started soaring up the best sellers lists.
| Author Information |
| David Wright, a Readers' Services Librarian with the Seattle Public Library's Fiction Department and chair of the Readers' Advisors of Puget Sound, contributes columns and reviews to the NoveList database and Booklist. He authored the Reader's Shelf column “Lessons from the Old School: Street Lit Pioneers” (LJ 2/1/06) |
