The Readers' Advisory Guide to Street Literature

Citation

Freeman, M. (2013), "The Readers' Advisory Guide to Street Literature", New Library World, Vol. 114 No. 3/4, pp. 191-191. https://doi.org/10.1108/03074801311304104

This is the latest offering from the ALA's well regarded Readers' Advisory Service (which includes the intriguing “Romance readers” advisory guide: the librarian's guide to love in the stacks).

So what is “street literature”? The novelist Teri Woods attempts, in a foreword to give an up to date definition. It seems to be the literature of the dispossessed, voices from the ghetto, the milieu of the poor, the alternative society, the Boyz in the Hood genre. The themes of survival in the urban dystopia are explored vividly with copious use of street slang; fast‐moving stories set on the street as an interactive arena with diverse language structures such as Black English, Hip‐Hop slang and Jamaican patois. Tracing out the genre's genealogy back to Charles Dickens, Stephen Crane and Upton Sinclair, Malcolm X – this genre of American urban fiction with its marginalised inhabitants, the author stresses the fact that “street lit” is not new and is embedded in American literature and history.

The author gives a useful chapter on searching the literature for “street‐lit”, typically reader's advisory questions, finding teen‐friendly “street‐lit”, collection development and she lists some of the best writers working in the “street‐lit” genre today – authors such as Teri Woods, K'Wan Foye and Shannon Holmes.

If public libraries are to enfold and mirror today's society they should pay some attention to “alternative genres”, and this well arranged and well produced book, with its good index and clear bibliography and suggested reading list will prove a useful and readable introduction to a subject of some mystery to many librarians.