Summary
In response to numbers like these, mainstream publishers slap scantily clad Black women placed in provocative poses on the covers of trade paperbacks, even when the work is literary fiction, not street lit, or urban fiction, as it is often called. Just as Ol' Massa encouraged slave men and women (or boys and girls) to mate so they could create slave babies and reproduce his wealth, some mainstream publishers have, according to Chambers, encouraged Black writers to sex up their work: When I was submitting a novel to a division of Random House, people that I had worked with before said I needed to pare down the suspense and intellectual elements of the novel and play up the raw sex for sex's sake. While the hardcover focused on a woman's face, the paperback reveals a bit of cleavage.\n But for Nick Chiles, a journalist who has co-authored with his wife, Denene Millner, a total of six non-fiction books and novels that, as their website states, celebrate Black love, the proliferation of salacious street lit impacts writers in ways they don't even realize.
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Extract
The Naked Truth
Black folk love sex. They crave it so much, they can't get enough. They need it in their music, need it in their music videos. Need it so much that when they're not watching it on BET or popping their fingers to it on hot 97 FM, they need to read about it. They need to read about it rough, rugged and raw. Black women like to be called b***** and h*** in the books they read. Apparently, they like to be pimped, though not by actual pimps. They like to be pimped by drug dealers and rap stars and athletes. And, after the sex, Black folk got to confess, got to tell all. Black people like to put their business out there for everyone to read. And, honey, everyone is.
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, sati...See the full content of this document
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