Is Enough Enough?

So....we just read on our friend Eisa Ulen’s blog http://www.eisaulen.com/blog/
that bestselling author Omar Tyree has just announced his “retirement” from street lit, stating that last July’s, The Last Street Novel, would be his final book in the genre (The current announcement comes prior to his September release, called Pecking Order). Tyree, the self-proclaimed offspring of Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim, and the “baby daddy” of the new “hood” lit movement, says enough is enough. He didn’t mean to start a trend that led to the avalanche of urban lit and erotica which has flattened much other work about African-American life in its path. Take a read and let us know what you think. Is enough, enough, too much, or too little too late? After all, as he says, publishing is a business. Are readers buying exactly what they want to read, or is a change gonna come?


For the record, I never called my work "street literature" and I never will. When I began to publish ground breaking contemporary novels with Flyy Girl in 1993, and Capital City in 1994, I called them "urban classics." They were "urban" because they dealt with people of color in the inner-city or "urban" population areas. They were "classics" because I considered myself one of the first to start the work of a new era. But now, after sixteen years and sixteen novels in the African-American adult urban fiction game, I feel like the man who created the monster Frankenstein. Things have gotten way out of hand. So it's now time to put up my pen and move on to something new, until the readership is ready to develop a liking for fresh material on other subjects. Read the complete story here:
http://thedailyvoice.com/voice/2008/06/street-lit-000748.php