| Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing American Litera Edition Contributor(s): Gifford, Justin (Author) |
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ISBN: 1439908109 ISBN-13: 9781439908105 Publisher: American Literatures Initiative OUR PRICE: $72.68 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: January 2013 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | American - African American - Literary Criticism | Mystery & Detective Fiction - Language Arts & Disciplines | Publishers & Publishing Industry |
| Dewey: 813.087 |
| LCCN: 2012032598 |
| Physical Information: 0.8" H x 6.1" W x 9" (0.85 lbs) 216 pages |
| Themes: - Ethnic Orientation - African American |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Lush sex and stark violence colored Black and served up raw by a great Negro writer, promised the cover of" Run Man Run," Chester Himes' pioneering novel in the black crime fiction tradition. In "Pimping Fictions," Justin Gifford provides a hard-boiled investigation of hundreds of pulpy paperbacks written by Himes, Donald Goines, and Iceberg Slim (aka Robert Beck), among many others. Gifford draws from an impressive array of archival materials to provide a first-of-its-kind literary and cultural history of this distinctive genre. He evaluates the artistic and symbolic representations of pimps, sex-workers, drug dealers, and political revolutionaries in African American crime literature-characters looking to escape the racial containment of prisons and the ghetto. Gifford also explores the struggles of these black writers in the literary marketplace, from the era of white-owned publishing houses like Holloway House-that fed books and magazines like Players to eager black readers-to the contemporary crop of African American women writers reclaiming the genre as their own. |