It's urban, it's real, but is this literature? Controversy rages over a new genre whose sales are headed off the charts

Black Issues Book Review, Sept-Oct, 2004 by Malcolm Venable, Tayannah McQuillar, Yvette Mingo

These days, it seems that nearly every black-owned bookstore and every street vendor s table--from 125th Street in Harlem to Jacksonville, Florida, to Chicago, and to Oakland, California, and back--is spilling over with titles in a new genre dubbed by some as urban fiction, by others as hip-hop fiction. These books are generally geared to younger audiences influenced more by TV, music videos and hip-hop culture than their Civil Rights Era-raised, Black Arts Movement-nurtured, Toni Morrison--worshipping parents.

What is urban of hip-hop fiction? Basically, it is set in the world of hustlers, pimps, thugs, chickenheads, blinged-out rappers or 'round-the-way baby mamas. The genre displays a street sensibility by using the language of everyday people in the hood. Of course, this sort of book is by no means new to the publishing game. It shares ancestry with the work of 1970s authors such as Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim, whose gritty depictions of street life and shady characters catapulted them to international fame. (See "The Legacy of Ghetto Pulp Fiction," BIBR, September-October 2001.) More recently, Sister Souljah's groundbreaking 1999 novel The Coldest Winter Ever (Atria), which has continued to be a best-seller among the hip-hop generation in the tire years since it was published, is forerunner and the prototype of this 21st-century rebirth of the urban novel.

Many popular books in this new genre were originally self-published--and often available only through the Internet. But a number of black-owned companies have cropped up to publish and/or distribute the books, and large, mainstream publishers are getting in on this boom by picking up and republishing or distributing some of the self-published stars. (See sidebar, "Industry Playas in Hip-Hop Fiction" page 26.)

Best-selling author Nikki Turner, a 29-year-old Richmond, Virginia, native who attended North Carolina Central State University, has been dubbed the "princess of hip-hop fiction" because of the success such books as A Hustler's Wife (Triple Crown, March 2003), A Project Chick (Triple Crown, July 2003) and in anticipation of her latest, coming this fall from Urban Books, Girls From Da Hood. She describes her audience as "ages fifteen to twenty-five--people in jail, people that went to college." But she adds, "At book signings, I have people from all walks of life--grandmothers, middle-aged men--I'm surprised."

Prolific author, publisher, and New York book retailer Carl Weber is not so surprised. (He launched the Urban Books imprint in August 2003, distributed by Kensington Publishing Corporation, is the author of five novels, including Baby Momma Drama [Dafina/Kensington, January 2003] and is president of a New York City retail chain, African American Bookstores, Inc.) "Our audience is fifteen to fifty," he says. "Most of the fifty year olds were in their early twenties when The Sugar Hill Gang came out with the first rap record that hit the Billboard charts, so they still have some tie-in to hip-hop. We definitely intentionally appeal to black people."

One might think the books appeal more to men, but, as with other literature, it is women who drive the market, sellers say. Russell Prince, a Harlem book vendor who has been selling on the street for eight years and currently runs four tables along 125th Street, says that men go for "the heavier stuff," but that "eighty percent of my customers are female."

Victoria M. Stringer's Triple Crown Publications has put out 14 titles and sold 300,000 trade paperbacks in 16 months. Triple Crown plans to release a total 25 books in 2004. (See "Triple Crown Winner," BIBR, May-June 2004.) Stringer, whose drug dealer/former boyfriend pulled her into a life that landed her in jail, started her company to publish the semiautobiographical novel she wrote while in prison, Let That Be the Reason (2001). This year, at June's 2004 BookExpo America, the major national trade show for booksellers, Stringer was fending off offers from mainstream publishers for her work and that of other authors Triple Clown publishes. She eventually signed a two-book deal for herself with Atria Books.

Dumbing down black literature? Or attracting new readers?

So-called street literature is now enjoying major mainstream success with many of the major publishing houses doling out six-figure deals to the writers who can tell the grimiest tale. It even rings the cash registers in mainstream bookstores: "Hip-hop fiction is doing for fifteen- to twenty-five-old African Americans what Harry Potter did for kids," Matt Campbell, a buyer for Waldenbooks, told Newsweek magazine; "[They are] getting a new audience excited about books."

Purists, though, are wondering aloud if the explosion in so-called ghetto lit--titles like Baby Momma Drama, The Sex Chronicles by Zaoe, and True to the Game (Triple Crown) by Teri Woods come to mind--is an entirely positive development. The seeming ease with which one can publish an urban book has created skeptics in surprising corners.