Urban, or gangster, fiction was first sold on New York’s streets.

By ANNE BARNARD

NEW YORK - In one book, the hero spirals toward a violent death dealing drugs on the streets of Queens, witnessing, along the way, a baby ripped apart by bullets. In another, a convict plots the seduction of his prison psychotherapist.
And then there’s Angel, a Versaceclad seductress who shoots her boyfriend in the head during sex, stuffs money from his safe into her Vuitton bags and, as she fondles the cash, experiences a sexual frisson narrated in terms too graphic to reproduce here.
All these characters, and the novels they populate, are favorites of Shonda Miller, 35, a devoted library-goer who devours a book a day, enforces a daily hour of reading time for her entire family and scours street stands and the Internet for new titles. She also acts as an unofficial guide and field scout for the Queens Library as it builds its collection of a fast-growing genre, written mainly by black authors about black characters and variously known as urban fiction, street lit or gangster lit.
It’s not the type of stories usually associated with librarians. But public libraries from the Queens section of New York City, the highest-circulation public library system in America, to York County in central Pennsylvania are embracing urban fiction as an exciting, if sometimes controversial, way to draw new people into reading rooms, spread literacy and reflect and explore the interests and concerns of the public they serve.
“We’ve got people who are reading for the first time. We’ve got people coming into our building asking for Teri Woods” - the creator of Angel - “who have never come here before” said Lora-Lynn Rice, the director of collections at the Martin Library in York County . “Why would we not embrace this?”
Urban fiction’s journey from street vendors to library shelves and sixfigure book deals is a case of culture bubbling from the bottom up. That is especially true in New York, where the genre, like hip-hop music, was developed by, for and about people in southeast Queens and other mostly black neighborhoods that have struggled with drugs, crime and economic stagnation.
Writers like Mark Anthony - who at 35 is Ms. Miller’s contemporary and the author of “Paper Chasers,” based on his youth in Queens - found themselves being rejected by agents and publishers. So they paid to self-publish their books and sold them in Harlem or Queens , around the corner from the borough library’s main branch. Soon, a stream of people were asking for the books. And the librarians went out on the street to buy them.
“If there’s some cultural phenomenon going on out there and it’s not in here, we want to know why,” said Joanne King, a spokeswoman for the Queens Library.
Ms. Miller said: “I read what I can relate to. They’re writing about what I’ve experienced. It’s easier than reading about Beverly Hills and Rodeo Drive.”
Of course, there is a backlash, which has complicated its reception in libraries. Its street language, graphic sex and violence are controversial in black literary circles, where critics say it perpetuates stereotypes and lament that it is shelved next to black literary writers like Toni Morrison, a Nobel laureate.
“There are black librarians who hate the genre, because they feel like it’s an embarrassment culturally,” said Vanessa Morris, an assistant teaching professor of library sciences at Drexel University in Philadelphia. But she says the genre tells the stories of African-Americans who survived the 1980s drug wars: “This is about documenting history, or, I should say, collective memory.”