A recent article in the Phila. Inquirer discussed books
(prison lit, street lit, urban lit, or hip hop fiction) as a
literary phenomenon that has brought several former inmates
lucrative sales. Sometimes they self-publish and move on to
mainstream publishers. The most successful sell between 20
and 50 thousand in paper. Often, sales from street vendors,
in malls and out of car trunks supplement bookstore sales.
Typical titles: Shafeeq, _Dangerously Insured_; Wahilda
Clark, _Thugs and the Women Who Love Them_; Reginald Hall,
_Memoir: Delaware Co. Prison;_ Vicki Stringer, _Let That Be
the Reason_.
I wonder if anyone has read any of these and thinks they
carry on noir traditions: hard boiled stories of people
responding to averse social conditions; the way people of all
social classes are in symbiotically predatory relationships;
the psychotic state of mind developed by prison routine and
hard man street behavior; the lack of real difference in
motives between underworld and upperworld; the unbridgeable
gulf between races and classes in 21st century America; the
explosion of rage against being told that freedom of
expression and privacy have to be curtailed because we have
an "implacable enemy" who must be fought by young and poor
people (not the president's and congress's own loved
ones).
One clever plot -- _Dangerously Insured -_- concerns two
women who set up an insurance policy for gangsters who are
almost certain that they will die before too many years
pass.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 04 Apr 2006 EDT