The rise of street literature: the literary genre about "gangsta life" spawned a younger Black readership, but is this literacy by any means necessary?(TREND)

IN PERCIVAL EVERETT'S NOVEL Erasure, Thelonious Ellison is a college professor who writes novels that are more praised than read. His work's engagement with French post-structuralists and ancient Greek literature impresses and baffles reviewers, who wonder what those subjects have to do with the African-American experience. Frustrated by his latest novel's seventh rejection and angered by the success of the street-lit hit We's Lives in Da Ghetto, Ellison dashes off a novella parodying the "true, gritty real stories of [B]lack life" that he has been advised to write. This satiric tale, which is included in Erasure in its entirety, is peopled with stock characters like the ...