Bookz in da Hood?

Posted Under: bookshelf

Written by Linda Villarosa

Note: I couldn’t resist posting this. There are some thing I like to remain as part of my history on the internet. There was Terry McMillan vs. Ghetto Lit, Literary Sharecropper: The Perilous Life of a Novelist by Jervey Tervelon, Southgate’s Writers Like Me that ran in the Times and Their Eyes Were Reading Smut. Yep, I’m harvesting them all right here for my own personal reference and now we can add Bookz in da Hood? to the list. Don’t worry. I’ve got you. I’m glad more notables are writing about it so it doesn’t just seem like a disgruntled author rant.

GO ON AND READ IT…

Novels like “Making Him Want It,” “Crackhead,” “Freak in the Sheets” and “Nasty Girls,” are hip-checking literary superstars like Toni Morrison off the shelves. Other authors never make it into print, squeezed out by dirty girls (and boys) like Zane, Nikki Turner, Karrine Steffans and their lower rent offspring.

For more on author and journalist Linda Villarosa, go to lindavillarosa.com

A new group offers an alternative to “street lit”

A few weeks ago, publishing’s Talented Tenth gathered at Random House to celebrate the launch of ringShout, a group dedicated to “recognizing, reclaiming and celebrating literary fiction and non fiction by black writers.” The organization’s founders–authors Martha Southgate, Eisa Nefertari Ulen and Bridgett Davis; Cave Canem ’sAlison Myers and Random House editor Chris Jackson–call ringShout “a place for black literature.”

But even as the night sparkled with writers, editors, booksellers and other black literati, a 10,000 pound elephant sat squarely in the center of the room: ghetto fiction, street lit or as one writer has called it “ho for dough books.” As we know, in African-American bookstores and the Af-Am interest sections of the chains, novels like “Making Him Want It,” “Crackhead,” “Freak in the Sheets” and “Nasty Girls,” are hip-checking literary superstars like Edward P. Jones, Toni Morrison and Edwidge Danticat off the shelves. Other authors never make it into print, squeezed out by dirty girls (and boys) like Zane, Nikki Turner, Karrine Steffans and their lower rent offspring.

The rise of this lust-fueled genre has sparked vigorous debate in African-American publishing circles. But the discussions occur in hissed whispers largely under the mainstream media radar. Author Nick Chiles hung out the dirty laundry two years ago in a buzzy New York Times op-ed piece called “Their Eyes Are Reading Smut.” In it he described urban fiction as “tasteless pornography.”

Ulen, in an essay in the latest issue of The Crisis Magazine, put it this way:

“Black folk love sex. They crave it so much, they can’t get enough…They need to read about it rough, rugged and raw. Black women like to be called bitch and ho in the books they read….This is Black life as expressed by contemporary commercial Black fiction and non fiction. These falsehoods, presented as truths, packaged as urban tales, titillate and, seemingly, satisfy so much, they sell like socks.”

Southgate didn’t refer to street lit at all when she bemoaned the lack of literary African-American writers in her much-blogged about essay “Writers Like Me” that ran in July in the New York Times Book Review. She was more direct last week at the ringShout event when discussing the plan to create a literary reading list. You could refer to it “if you’re in Barnes and Noble standing there looking at 8 million booty books and can’t decide what to pick,” she said to the crowd of about 200. Her comment caused uneasy titters.

Many in the room that night have been forced to perform a delicate balancing act when it comes to street lit–and everyone else has been slow or unwilling to confront and openly criticize the handful of black editors and publishers who broker the few deals that African-American writers receive. It is understood that, as smart and powerful as several of them are, they are not the real kingmakers in what has been facetiously called “the incredible whiteness of book publishing.” And no disrespect to Zane, Turner and the rest who have used grit and wit to “get theirs” in an industry that has stubbornly resisted diversity.

Most publishing houses tread a fine line, guided by the model created by an industry with far more experience marketing to African Americans: fast food restaurants. Sure McDonald’s offers grilled chicken salads with apple slices on the side, but what sells best is the juicy bacon burger with fries and a supersize Coke. The greasy grub doesn’t cost much to make, tastes good, has little nutritional value but pays the bills.

Similarly, Atria, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, published Ulen and will also release “Yellow Moon,” a new novel by the award-winning author Jewell Parker Rhodes. But as far as African-American authors, it is Zane, thin-sliced as Strebor Books, Zane Presents, Chocolate Flava and Eroticanoir, who is Atria’s million dollar baby.

Without screaming its intent, ringShout is a positive response to this exploding trend. The stated goals of the group are to develop resource guides, publishing projects, a reading series and website, as well as provide outreach to bookstores and academia.

But as noble and lofty as these objectives are, the group will face its challenges. What exactly is literary fiction and non fiction? Is it an “I know it when I see it” kind of thing? Is it “what I write?” In the largely black and white world of publishing, defining literary is a gray area.

For example, it’s definitely this:

“Moses closed his eyes and bent down and took a pinch of the soil and ate it with no more thought than if it were a spot of cornbread. He worked the dirt around in his mouth and swallowed, leaning his head back and opening his eyes in time to see the strip of sun fade to dark blue and then to nothing. He was the only man in the realm, slave or free, who ate dirt, but while the bondage women, particularly the pregnant ones, ate it for some incomprehensible need, for that something that ash cakes and apples and fatback did not give their bodies, he ate it not only to discover the strengths and weaknesses of the field, but because the eating of it tied him to the only thing in his small world that meant almost as much as his own life.” - From “The Known World” by Edward P. Jones

And definitely not this:

“…Ride it,” he ordered her.

Paula began to move up and down on Cleezy, the sound of her wetness driving him crazy. “Faster.” She sped up. “Faster.” In no time at all Paula looked like she was riding a mechanical bull. Cleezy was in control, pumping faster and faster with each stroke, forcing Paula to keep up. Up and down she went, her titties flopping.

Cleezy lifted his head and looked down to see cream settling in Paula’s jungle…” - From Riding Dirty on I95 by Nikki Turner.

Or this:

“He was huge. I knew there was no way I’d ever be able to take the whole thing down my throat, but I was willing to give it the old college try…” From The Sex Chronicles by Zane.

But what about between the between? And who gets to decide? Will there soon be a VIP section in bookstores, roped off in black velvet, for literary writers only? Warning labels on some titles?

On the ringShout website, the founders pledge to support “serious, skilled black writers creating ambitious fiction.” But they are careful to add, “We also want to assert our centrality to all facets of the American experience, literary and otherwise.”

That will be the test–to find just the right degree of centrality. Anybody and everybody who loves books, especially ours, must figure this out together. ringShout is named after a sacred circle dance created by Africans brought here as slaves. That dance was participatory, a communal celebration for the entire community. So go to the ringShout blog, see what the group’s all about and get involved. And remember that the aim must be to keep our literary circle sacred–and very, very wide.

Writers Like Me

Posted Under: bookshelf

Written by Martha Southgate

Note: Not me. I didn’t write the article but I agree with her and I believe I do fall into the category of the writers like “her” that she’s talking about even though I write with more of a literary “edge”. It’s a sad day for publishing. Noted bookstores like Karibu closing. Whose to blame? What were or weren’t they selling? I don’t know. I just don’t know.

GO ON AND READ IT…

I am a 46-year-old writer of “literary” fiction. I’ve had three novels published — the first for young people, the last two for adults. All have won minor prizes, been respectfully reviewed and sold modestly. I’ve been awarded a few fairly competitive fellowships and grants. The business is full of fiction writers like me. With one difference: I’m black, born and raised in the United States. At the parties and conferences I attend, and in the book reviews I read, I rarely encounter other African-American “literary” writers, particularly in my age bracket. There just don’t seem to be that many of us out there, and that’s something I’ve come to wonder about a great deal. And so I got on the phone with some editors and African-American writers to talk about it.

For many writers, middle age is when they hit their stride. Robert Gottlieb of Knopf, who has been Toni Morrison’s editor for many years, said, “Many very fine writers take time to get there.” Looking at the white American fiction writers who have the most cultural prominence, one quickly sees a large group in their 40s or 50s (Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody, Jane Smiley, Michael Cunningham et al.) who have generally had four or more major works of fiction published. Gottlieb points out that Morrison’s first two books sold adequately, but it wasn’t until her third novel, “Song of Solomon,” published the year she turned 46, that she had a commercial breakthrough. “It was larger and more ambitious, demonstrating a new power and authority, and the world noticed,” he said. “Some careers start with a bang — ‘Invisible Man,’ ‘Catch-22.’ Others take time to find a significant readership — Anne Tyler, Toni. And sometimes I feel that those are the healthiest ones.”

But when you look at the careers of African- American writers, you don’t always see that healthy arc. Ralph Ellison, for example, seemed to lose his way completely after “Invisible Man.” These days, there are only a few names of black authors born in the United States, beyond Morrison’s, that the average reader of serious fiction might easily drop — Colson Whitehead, ZZ Packer, Edward P. Jones. Of these three, only Jones is over 40.

In some ways, the American literary scene is more racially and culturally diverse than ever. A few examples: Of the 21 writers on Granta’s recent Best of Young American Novelists list, six (including Packer and Uzodinma Iweala) are people of color (many colors: black, South and East Asian, Hispanic), and seven were born or raised outside the United States. Indian writers born or educated here, like Jhumpa Lahiri, Vikram Chandra and Kiran Desai, win critical acclaim and big sales. “Girlfriend,” “urban-lit” and other branches of commercial genre fiction by African-Americans have continued to enjoy a boom since the door-busting success of Terry McMillan’s “Waiting to Exhale” in 1992. But black authors writing in an ambitious, thoughtful way about American subjects are harder to find — even when they do get published. Malaika Adero, a senior editor at Atria Books, said: “Literary African-American writers have difficulty getting publicity. The retailers then don’t order great quantities of the books. Readers don’t know what books are available and therefore don’t ask for them. It’s a vicious cycle.”

Though the publishing industry remains overwhelmingly white, editors say they are always looking for good, marketable work by writers of any background. Morgan Entrekin, publisher of Grove/Atlantic, which recently published Michael Thomas’s first novel, “Man Gone Down” — one of the few novels by an African-American to grace the cover of this publication of late — said: “I don’t tend to approach the black writers we publish as African-American. I see them as writers first.”

But there’s colorblindness, and then there’s blindness. Christopher Jackson, executive editor at Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, tells a story about being mistaken for Iweala at the launch party for Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists issue — even though Iweala is more than 10 years Jackson’s junior, had just left the stage as an honoree and, frankly, doesn’t look much like Jackson. Let’s face it, something like that is awfully unlikely to happen to a white editor or writer. It’s hard to say whether this obtuseness translates into a lack of interest in African-American work, but some black writers think it might. The novelist Tayari Jones, author of “The Untelling,” said: “I know that there are very few black authors who publish the fourth novel. Hardly any of us are considered prestige authors, so no one is going to sign us up for our names alone.” Calvin Reid, a senior news editor at Publishers Weekly, who often covers African-American publishing, agrees that black writers stuck in the midlist face an uphill battle, but he sees it as a business reality, not a racial thing: “If you have two or three books out and you’ve never sold more than 3,000 copies, people make decisions based on that.”

Things are tough all over, but arguably tougher for some. For many black writers, a writing life very rarely unfolds the way it does for so many white writers you could name: know you want to be a writer from the age of 10, get your first book published at 26, go on to produce slowly but steadily over a lengthy career. Even Morrison didn’t follow that timeline: her first novel wasn’t published until she was nearly 40 and had worked for a number of years as a teacher and then an editor at Random House. And she didn’t quit that day job until urged to do so by Gottlieb in the mid-1970s, after “Sula” was published.

So what’s holding us up? Sometimes it’s just the ordinary difficulty of juggling family, writing and earning a living. But African-American writers also speak of a larger problem of what I’d call internal or cultural permission. It’s just plain harder to decide to be a writer if you don’t have a financial cushion or a long cultural tradition of people going out on that bohemian limb. Consider the case of Edward P. Jones. He published his first book, “Lost in the City,” in 1992 (he was 41 at the time) to much critical acclaim and a number of significant honors, if not huge sales. He returned to his day job at Tax Notes magazine, where he remained until he was laid off 10 years later. He then wrote “The Known World” in about six months — though he told me he’d been thinking about it nearly those whole 10 years. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize.

When asked why he didn’t make the leap to full-time writing sooner, Jones spoke firmly: “If you’re born poor or you’re born working-class, a job is important. People who are born with silver spoons in their mouths never have to worry. They know someone will take care of them. Worrying about not having a job would have put a damper on any creativity that I would have had. So I’m glad I had that job.”

The problem isn’t just money, says Randall Kenan, a 1994 Whiting Award winner who published two critically acclaimed books of fiction in 1989 and 1992, and two nonfiction books since 1999: “I think among middle-class black folk, it’s still a struggle to validate literature as a worthy way to spend your time.” ZZ Packer, the author of the story collection “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere,” who is currently at work on a novel, said the situation is somewhat different for those who are younger. (She is 34.) “People who came half a generation before us were the first ones to begin to go to elite colleges in larger numbers,” she said. “They were beholden to a lot of their parents’ expectations, namely, that if you go to a prestigious school, you’re going to become a doctor or a lawyer, you’re not going to ‘waste your time’ writing. People who are around my age have seen blacks in the Northeastern establishment for a while. … They don’t always feel the same obligation to ditch their dream for something more practical.”

It saddens me to think of the dreams that have been ditched, the stories that haven’t been told because of racism, because of fear and economic insecurity, because that first novel didn’t move enough copies. I hope to see the day when there are more of us at the party (and the parties), when the work of African-Americans who tell our part of the American story well receives the celebration, and the sales, it deserves.

Oprah Book Club Picks A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose

Posted Under: bookshelf

This morning Oprah announced her new book club selection by saying she was “breaking new ground” with her “boldest choice yet”: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose by Eckhart Tolle. Saying she was “over the moon excited” about the book, Oprah described it as an extension of her life’s mission, “to lead people to their higher selves.” She also announced that the book would be the subject of her “first worldwide interactive class,” a free ten-week course she will co-teach with Tolle on Oprah.com live Mondays at 9 p.m. EST beginning March 3.

I personally wish she’d pick The Plural Thing: Spiritually Preparing for Your Soul Mate, but I’m keep hope alive and holding on. It may be her NEXT selection. You never know.

Karibu Bookstores Closing

Posted Under: bookshelf

Sometimes you wish it really was a hoax.

January 22, 2008

Dear Karibu Customer,

After 15 years of service within the Washington, DC metropolitan area, Karibu Books, a Black bookstore chain will be closing its doors. We sincerely thank each and every one of you for your patronage and support. We are optimistic that our mission to empower and educate through a comprehensive selection of books by and about people of African descent will continue to resonate within the communities we proudly served.

Since 1993, we have been blessed to help thousands of local, regional and national authors share their incredible stories of faith, hope, love, peace, politics and race. We cannot begin to express our gratitude for the countless authors who have graced our six stores and enriched our customers’ lives.

On Sunday, January 27th, We will be closing our Security Square (Baltimore, MD) and Forestville locations. The remaining locations, Bowie Town Center, The Mall at Prince Georges and Iverson Mall will close on Sunday, February 10th. Our Pentagon City store is already closed.

Effective immediately, all inventory at all locations will be 50% off. All fixtures will also be available for purchase on February 10th. See individual store managers for more information.

Again, we respectfully thank you for your loyalty, laughter and love. What an honor and privilege it has been to serve our community!

Sincerely,
Simba Sana
CEO
Karibu Books

Karibu Locations:
Security Square Mall, 6901 Security Boulevard, Baltimore, Md 21244, 410.944.6090
Centre’ at Forestville, 3289 B Donnell Drive, Forestville, Md 20747, 301.736.6170
The Mall at Prince George’s, 3500 East West Hwy, Hyattsville, Md 20782, 301.559.1140
Iverson Mall, 3817 Branch Ave., Hillcrest Heights, Md. 20748, 301.899.3730
Bowie Town Center, 15624 Emerald Way, Bowie, Md 20716, 301.352.4110

Bestselling Authors Know Promotion

Posted Under: bookshelf

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