from yahoo
By Diane Bartz
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - After years in the literary underground, "street lit" -- a sort of hip hop black literature that is often self published and sold on U.S. street corners -- may finally hit the big time.
Street lit stories are rough in every sense -- the language, the violence, the explicit descriptions of sex and the determination of the characters to escape desolate inner city neighborhoods.
Religion, obsession with brand names and explicit struggles between right and wrong play a large role in the books, making them a combination of morality tales, Mario Puzo's most violent Mafia novels and chick-lit shopping fiction.
"It wasn't really a phenomena at first," said Simba Sana, who co-owns the small Karibu book chain in suburban Washington, D.C. "They basically appealed to dudes who were just out of prison."
Sister Souljah's novel "The Coldest Winter Ever" has sold a million copies since it came out five years ago and still sells well. She and writers like Nikki Turner have been picked up by big publishers partially because of loyal women readers.
"What really broke it open was Sister Souljah," said Sana "It was a book about a black girl.... It broke it open for Nikki Turner."
At any given time, seven or eight of Karibu's best-selling paperbacks are street lit novels, said Sana.
But it could go farther. The same middle-class white people who read Ha Jin because of an interest in China or Mario Vargas Llosa to get an inside glimpse of Latin America might read Solomon Jones' gripping "The Bridge" to learn about ghettos in their own city.
Tony Medina, who teaches literature and writing at Howard University, would prefer to see bookstores stock better written books about street life -- works like "Daddy was a Number Runner" by Louise Meriweather or "Down these Mean Streets" by Piri Thomas.
"I come from the projects. I come from the 'hood. It's like any place, you have beauty and ugly side by side. Why celebrate the ugly?" he said. "I think it (street lit) causes a problem. ... It romanticizes hustlers and pimps."
"There's a whole wealth of literature out there that's more challenging, more redemptive," he said. "People are saying, 'At least they're reading.' That's garbage. That's a cop-out."
Malaika Adero, a senior editor at the Atria division of Simon and Schuster which publishes Sister Souljah and four other street-lit authors, disagrees.
"It is a portrayal of what is urban America and what goes on in marginalized societies," she said. "The readers of these books are satisfied to see the world as they know it, to see language as they hear it or speak it. They see characters that they know."
ORIGINS IN THE 1960S
Street lit's fathers were Iceberg Slim, whose real name was Robert Beck, and Donald Goines, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Both had been to prison and wrote about prostitution, drugs and the streets from a first-hand view. Slim's best known book was "Pimp: The Story of My Life" while Goines' most popular book was "Black Girl Lost."
These were authors without creative writing degrees, agents, publishers or appearances on television talk shows. Authors would often pay to have books published, and they would be sold on street corners and out of the back of vans.
Despite the grittiness of Nikki Turner's novels, she was raised by her grandparents to be a good girl. Her background is middle class and conservative.
"Basically I read 'Coldest Winter Ever' by Sister Souljah and when I put that book down there were no more books. At the time, I was a travel agent. I said, 'I'm gonna write a book,"' said Turner, 30. "I was always intrigued by that lifestyle but I couldn't have joined it. My grandparents would have killed me."
Turner's first two books, "A Hustler's Wife" and "A Project Chick," sold a combined total of 150,000 copies, said her manager, Marc Gerald.
Turner has been signed by Ballantine Books as their first street lit writer. Her third book, "The Glamorous Life: A Novel," comes out in April.
Borders bookstores has caught on to the books' popularity and are including street lit writers like Vicky Stringer in their African American fiction along with classics like James Baldwin's "Go Tell It on the Mountain."
Sana seemed frustrated with the quality of some of the books. Four of the most popular novels are riddled with errors. In one, two characters' names are switched after one dies. In all four, slang is sometimes incomprehensible, grammatical errors common, moral characters tend to be made of cardboard and the writing often repetitious. But all are fast-moving and hard to put down.
"It's been good and bad. You got people who are making some money. You have more people reading," said Sana, who said that he would push customers interested in street lit toward Malcolm X. But those same people would never read Toni Morrison, he said. "That's too much of a jump."
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