For this month’s newsletter, we thought it would be interesting to analyze a month of BBB requests in order to find out what types of books make up the majority of our requests, and profile a few of those authors and books. Reflecting just under 700 asks, the data revealed a broad range of interests spanning from books on Santería such as Teachings of the Santería Gods by Ócha’ni Lele to works of historical fiction like Standing at the Scratch Line by Guy Johnson. The most highly requested authors? T. Styles, James Patterson, Penelope Sky, Robert Greene, and Sarah J. Maas.
Here’s the breakdown:
Request Type:
Nonfiction: 73.2%
Fiction: 26.8%
Nonfiction Requests:
Religion: 13.8%
Miscellaneous: 12.8%
Finance/Business/Real Estate: 11.2%
Self-Help: 8.7%
Magazines: 5.7%
Astrology/Mysticism: 5.3%
Biography/Memoir: 4.5%
Law: 4.3%
Reference: 3.9%
Arts: 3.9%
Health/Fitness: 3.7%
History: 3.7%
Black History: 3.4%
Language Learning: 3%
RPGs (Role Playing Games): 2.8%
Career: 2.6%
Conspiracy: 2.4%
DIY: 2.4%
Technology: 1.8%
Fiction Requests:
Urban: 30.6%
Thriller: 18.1%
Fantasy: 13%
Other: 9.8%
Manga: 8.8%
Comics/Graphic Novels: 8.8%
Romance: 7.3%
Historical Fiction: 3.6%
Genre Spotlight: Urban Fiction
Also known as street lit or street fiction, urban fiction is, as the name suggests, set in the modern city and often focuses on the environment’s dark underside. Routinely overlooked by both academia and the mainstream publishing industry, it has achieved success on its own terms and provided otherwise overlooked writers with a significant popular platform. “The emergence of street lit,” writes Jody Rosen in the New York Times, “is one of the big stories in recent American publishing, a juggernaut that has generated huge sales by catering to a readership—young, black and, for the most part, female—that historically has been ill-served by the book business.”
The origins of urban fiction may be traced to turn-of-the-century realist portrayals of city life such as Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). In the twentieth century, New York City played a particularly important role in its further development; the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s was a key precursor through its focus on the African American experience, as was the Beat Generation’s documentation of local drug culture and literary use of underground slang. After a period of decline in the 1980s and early ’90s when lyrically oriented music—most notably hip-hop—became the dominant force of New York’s Black culture, it reemerged in the late ’90s when new business models and technologies removed barriers to independent publishing.
Today, one of urban fiction’s most popular proponents is Toy Styles. Also known as T. Styles, Reign, and Mikal Malone, she is the most requested fiction writer by those incarcerated in New York prisons. Having spent time in jail herself, Styles crafts propulsive narratives that have the ring of authenticity; her 2015 novel Black & Ugly, for example, tells the interwoven stories of four different friends from the same block, whose friendship is tested by a game of Truth or Dare. Also popular are Ashley and JaQuavis Coleman, who have co-authored numerous novels, many of them distinguished by impactful opening scenes. The married couple were high-school classmates in Flint, Michigan, but encountered each other in the outside world when Ashley retrieved a brick of cocaine that JaQuavis—then a young dealer—had been forced to discard when fleeing police. The Colemans tell a fictionalized version of this alternative meet-cute in their first novel, Dirty Money (2005).
Author Spotlight: Robert Greene
Robert Greene is by far the most widely banned author in United States prisons. His best-known book, The 48 Laws of Power, analyzes the nature of power in relation to social structures and interpersonal relationships.
In an interview with PEN America, Greene revealed that he has received many letters from incarcerated people telling them how much the book had helped them to navigate an “often terrifying and tricky environment they found themselves in in prisons where they had no idea who was on their side and who was against them.”
In response to the question of why his books are so widely banned, Greene says “I believe it is because prison is a system of infantilizing people, of making sure they are completely dependent on the prison system. [ . . .] By banning this book and curating in general what books prisoners can read, the prison system reveals itself for what it is: an attempt at extending the dependence of prisoners to even their thinking. [ . . . ] They may disguise this in the case of my book as being an attempt to protect them, but the truth is this is about power and total control.”
Book Spotlight: Assata: An Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2001)
Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard)’s 2001 autobiography is a vivid account of the experiences that led to her life in radical activism. Targeted by J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign to infiltrate and criminalize Black nationalist organizations and their leaders, Shakur was incarcerated for four years prior to her conviction on flimsy evidence in 1977 as an accomplice to the 1973 murder of a white state trooper. Two years after her conviction, she escaped from prison and was given political asylum by Cuba, where she now resides.
Assata notably includes a transcript of “To My People,” a statement recorded on Independence Day, 1973, and released by Shakur while in jail in Middlesex County, New Jersey, in response to media coverage. In the recording, Assata publicly describes her participation in the Black Liberation Army and her participation in the incident that landed her behind bars. She describes the police corruption, structural inequality between blacks and whites, and the American support of wars and regimes in Cambodia, Vietnam, and South Africa.
Alternating between reflections on the writer’s childhood in Queens, New York, and on her time in prison, Assata combines the emotional force of a memoir with the impact of a revolutionary political screed. “No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them,” Shakur asserts. “Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.”
Series Spotlight: A Court of Thorns and Roses
This fantasy series by Sarah J. Maas is a loose retelling of Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s “Beauty and the Beast.” The story follows a nineteen-year-old huntress named Feyre and her love for Tamlin, an immortal fairy disguised as a beast who captures her in retribution for her killing of a wolf.
The author of two other highly successful fantasy series Throne of Glass and Crescent City, Maas is currently working on a television adaptation of A Court of Thorns and Roses for Hulu. The series has gone viral on Tiktok, where the hashtag #ACOTAR (A Court of Thorns and Roses) has garnered more than five billion views.