Download Free Urban Books ((BETTER))
Doreatha Conneely
The original collection of 91 books was purchased in 2004 at the Printed Matter bookstore with support from a Washington University in St. Louis Interdisciplinary Teaching Grant received by the original faculty team.
The goal of assembling this collection is to provide study material for students in the class, which has been taught since 2004. Since then, student final projects have been added to the collection, which now numbers over 150 books.
When referring to urban books, one usually thinks of urban fiction. Urban novels are a type of literature that dives into stories of inner-city life including challenging social issues like poverty and crime as well as urban romance, fantasy, and the exploration of city culture.
Even if the habitual reader is real, surely their numbers must be shrinking? I can believe that before television and then the media saturated internet, many more people had a need for cheap books in copious supply that did no more than entertain. But there are now so many competing ways for people to invest their leisure time that the mass market paperback or even the e-book are surely struggling for market share? How long can mass market publishing persist with its business model, if there is no longer a mass market readership?
I suspect that the number of readers following this habit remains about constant; they are just become more spread into finer niches over time which means you get the wave effect in bookshops of lots of whatever is big surrounded by the debris of what was a heavy seller a couple of years ago.
Speaking from my bookstore girl experience, I have to say that the mass market paperback is still quite popular. Almost every day I see people walk out with fat stacks of Robert Jordan, or Barry Eisler, or Stephen King, or Charlie Stross (quite popular at our store!).
The trends of rapid population growth and urbanization in the less developed countries of the world have increased political instability to a tipping point in many spots around the globe. Political violence is now an urban phenomenon, and will only become more so.
To be sure, the US military has fought on urban terrain in the past. But generally, wars have been fought for cities, not in them. And in the past, urban fights happened so infrequently that military forces adapted when necessary and then quickly returned to preparing for non-urban combat against near-peer adversaries. But urban is the future, and the future is now.
This element can make or break a good story. Dialogue is important and using it correctly is vital to the tone of your story. Slang words, ebonics and bad grammar is all apart of the streets and it is welcome. Unlike traditional editing urban fiction falls under a different ball game. You can use aint and for sho (for sure) because it reads like it sounds and provides authenticity to your urban fiction writing. Readers will quickly put down your work if you use proper english in your dialogue. Crazy I know!
It's a well-established genre. Sistah Souljah's The Coldest Winter Ever, Gangsta by K'wan, The Cartel series by Ashley & JaQuavis, Addicted (or really anything) by Zane... many of urban fiction's foundational books remain popular multiple decades after they were first published. And some literary criticism argues that books widely considered classics and taught in schools today, like Oliver Twist or the work of Langston Hughes, fit beneath the umbrella of urban fiction.
That's my weakness, to be honest. My favourite main characters are mages. I've already read the Dresden Files, fucking loved it, Sandman Slim, fucking loved it, Iron Druid, kinda loved it. I couldn't get through the Laundry Files because the jargon just felt too thick for me to sift through. I've been through Simon R Green's work, fucking loved it all. Loved Kingkiller Chronicles, too, even though it isn't urban fantasy but MAGIC.
Sister Souljah was following in the tradition of Black storytellers before her. A closer look at the origins of urban fiction reveals the genre as a foundational part of the Blaxploitation era, confessional-style gangsta rap, and drug cinema that turned films like Paid in Full and Belly into cult classics, and by examining that history, we can trace it to one of the dominant influences on contemporary pop culture even now.
Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?
Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed.
Sudhir Venkatesh has uncovered a social world that will surprise even the most sophisticated observers of human behavior. This extraordinary study could become a classic urban ethnography, and will certainly change the way we think about life and work in the underground.
Off the Books is an outstanding contribution to our understanding urban economic, social and political processes. This engrossing ethnography has led me to change how I theoretically think about fundamental concepts such as social capital, social isolation, and the state of civil society in the US.
Remember the Chicago grad student in Freakonomics who figured out why drug dealers live with their mothers? His name is Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, and his new book, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, is the riveting drug-dealer back story--and a lot more. Venkatesh, who is now a professor of sociology and African-American studies at Columbia, spent 1995 to 2003 following the money in 10 square blocks of the Chicago ghetto. He finds an intricate underground web. In it are dealers and prostitutes--and also pastors who take their money, nannies who don't report income, unlicensed cab drivers, off-the-books car mechanics, purveyors of home-cooked soul food, and homeless men paid to sleep outside stores. Venkatesh's insight is that the neighborhood doesn't divide between 'decent' and 'street'--almost everyone has a foot in both worlds. 'Don't matter in some ways if it's the gang or the church,' says one woman as she describes the network that gives her some sense of security. The Wire meets academia, Off the Books is a great and an instructive read.
In Off the Books, Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh defines the underground economy as 'a web in which many different people, from the criminal to the pious, from the down-and-out to the bourgeois, are inextricably intertwined'...The story Venkatesh tells in Off the Books is specific to Maquis Park, but the underground economy he found there almost certainly has its counterpart in the black ghettos of large cities. Indeed, its reach extends beyond the ghetto to the kitchens of restaurants, the homes of the well-off and the myriad service jobs that employ workers off the books. Yet it remains in the shadows, barely touched by researchers, a vast world usually ignored, misunderstood, or dismissed with stereotypes. Venkatesh's riveting account describes the underground economy through vividly realized characters...[His] dissection of Maquis Park's underground economy overturns one stereotype and common assumption about the urban poor after another...Venkatesh finds the underground economy's origins in the racism, economic devastation, and political abandonment that have decimated many big American cities...What can be done? Venkatesh offers no concrete remedies. But that is not his point. Off the Books is not about policy. Wonderfully written, brilliantly researched, it illuminates, as no other book has done, the ubiquitous world of shady activities that structure everyday life for the residents of the nation's Maquis Parks in ways few Americans observe or understand.
Venkatesh paints a detailed picture that reflects his close acquaintance with the neighborhood, moving from businesses that are legal but off the books to those that are entirely outside the law and talking to home-based food preparers and preachers, street hustlers and gang members...This is a Chicago you don't know, told in readable prose that puts most other sociologists to shame.
In Sudhir Venkatesh's newly published Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, readers are introduced to a cast-royale of rogues, some loveable, others little short of detestable, who inhabit a super-isolated ghetto neighborhood in Southside Chicago...For four hundred pages, Venkatesh describes in intimate detail the often bizarre world of economic relationships in this urban edge zone, largely outside the web of economic, political, legal, and law-enforcement structures that dominate mainstream American life. The result is a compelling, deeply disturbing ground-level view of today's underclass...His approach--offering a pastiche of images of the ghetto economy rather than bombarding readers with statistics on income levels, life expectancy, and so forth--firmly situates Venkatesh in a long tradition of writers preoccupied with anecdotally chronicling America's underside and crafting verbal portraits of the colorful, often entertaining misfits on the margins...Overall, this is a fascinating look at a place and community that would otherwise remain entirely under the radar. If our economy and society throws up such spectacular inequalities, at the very least we owe it to the poorest of the poor to try to understand their lives, their struggles, their pain. Venkatesh takes us into this world; it's an often-ugly place, but, as Off the Books shows, it is also one that is strangely compelling.
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