Hip-hop lit draws urban youth

Jerome Ellis says he was a good student in school, but when it came to reading fiction for homework he "just couldn't deal with it."

"I would zone right out," said the 23-year-old Morristown, N.J., resident. "You know when you start reading a page and find yourself staring? That was me." Ellis, who grew up in New York's Harlem, said the books assigned in school were "always about some life or time that I wasn't a part of — things that had nothing to do with me. It just wasn't interesting."

Now, a new genre in publishing is all about serving the appetites of a certain segment of young black urban America — those, like Ellis, 18 to 35 and interested in rap music and street life.

Hip-hop literature is also known as gangsta-lit, ghetto fiction, street-lit, hip-hop novels, street-life novels, hip-hop lit, blaxploitation novels and urban pulp fiction.

But by any name, these stories about pimps, prostitutes, street crime, drugs, violence and illicit sex are creating a new breed of reader and a new profit niche.

While there are no hard sales numbers available for these publications, the word in publishing circles and on the street is that these novels are hot — in more ways than one.

While titles like "Thug-A-Licious" and "A Hustler's Wife" might raise eyebrows, mainstream publishing houses are signing on.

"It's the largest growing and consistently growing genre," says Louise Burke, executive vice president and publisher of Pocket Books, a division of Simon and Schuster.

Burke, and others in publishing, liken the trend to the blaxploitation films of the 1970s as well as a revival of similarly themed books such as "Whoreson" by Donald Goines, written in 1972, and "Trick Baby" by Iceberg Slim, in 1973.

In the years since, the genre has operated underground, run largely by self-published authors and street vendors. And it has remained popular among prison populations.

Then in January came the publication of "The Coldest Winter Ever" by hip-hop artist Sister Souljah. It has sold more than 1 million copies.

"Here you had this strong black woman bringing this back to the mainstream. Sister Souljah wasn't an unknown entity. Hip-hop was her market, and she promoted it to her market. Publishers realized they could make money with this genre," said Karen Thomas, editorial director for Kensington Books in New York.

Other artists are picking up on the momentum. Hip-hop kingpin 50 Cent has teamed with MTV/Pocket Books to create a series of novellas and graphic novels for a G-Unit Books street fiction series to debut next year.

"People like to hear and read about where they come from, and the public [in general] wants to hear the gangster folklore — what gangsters go through on the streets," says Sal Dizzal, a 27-year-old rapper from Elizabeth, N.J., whose stage name is Mental Case.

"It's important to note that with Sister Souljah, she was promoting to kids who weren't in the bookstores because they didn't think there was anything for them there," said Thomas. "Even in the suburban areas, you now have kids going into their library looking for some of these books."

The Library Journal, an industry publication, has recently acknowledged the popularity of urban literature. Making a point to distance the genre from "African-American fiction," a posting earlier this month noted urban fiction novels "often contain graphic sex and violence, so the addition of these books to teen areas of the library is controversial."

"However, their high appeal to otherwise reluctant readers makes them valuable as a way of connecting with young patrons," it said.

Marc Gerald, a literary agent with Los Angeles-based The Agency Group Ltd., says the market for these books is huge.

"The movement is bigger than one or two writers," he said. "There are literally hundreds and hundreds of people writing these books, and some are making it into the mainstream."

While hip-hop lit may be selling well because it appeals to a niche mass audience, African-American writer Omotosho (he uses only one name) doesn't see the appeal.

Omotosho, author of "They Tell Me of a Home" and "Dismantling Black Manhood," says he considers the genre "trash literature."

"It's a shame that gangsta-lit, particularly concerning African Americans, has now become characterized as 'the people's' major literary voice,' " said Omotosho, who is a professor of African-American studies at Clark Atlanta University in Georgia.

"The marketplace is developing this mutation into the mainstream," he said, adding that no one should think of it as the voice of a new literary age. "The text is devoid of literary devices, like metaphors and similes, and they're trying to make it literary. Let it be what it is, but let's not raise it to high literature. ... Reading and studying really serious literature has become an act of the past."

Ex-con Vickie M. Stringer self-published her first novel, "Let That Be the Reason," as an inspiration to others to stay straight. She served seven years in prison (1994 to 2001) for drug trafficking and in 2002 founded her hip-hop and urban literature company, Triple Crown Publications, now based in Columbus, Ohio. She has nine full-time employees and distributes books throughout the U.S. and abroad.

"I remember in prison reading Danielle Steele and saying, 'Yeah, right.' ... You just can't relate. We [African Americans] love to read if there's something we want to read."

Stringer said her first work was "a story about the choices one woman makes and how her decisions would be her emancipation from street life or her destruction."