fbpx
Reverse-Gentrification of the Literary World

Akashic Books

||| |||

Catalog » Browse by Title: B » Bronx Biannual: The Literary Journal of Urbane Urban Literature

Bronx Biannual: The Literary Journal of Urbane Urban Literature

Edited by:

A literary journal’s debut featuring writing from: Donnell Alexander, Federico Anderson, Dana Crum, Michael A. Gonzales, KRS-One, Michael C. Ladd, Ferentz Lafargue, Reginald Lewis, Adam Mansbach, Caille Millner, muMs, and Greg Tate.

$14.95 $11.21

Description

Bronx Biannual is the most important literary journal in hip-hop America. Consider Bronx Biannual an urban Paris Review, or McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern from a hip-hop standpoint. The journal will publish new writing—fiction, essays, reportage, interviews, poems—twice a year. The intention is to publish both celebrated and unsung writers on a variety of subjects germane to the black aesthetic. Urbane urban literature: bourgeois yet boulevard. Bronx Biannual will be fluid like water. No guiding manifesto per se, no set format. Issues might be published as graphic novels, or with two sheets of metal bound like a spiral notebook and shrink-wrapped in a Mylar sleeve, or with a concept in mind of what the Factory might’ve come up with had Andy Warhol put out a literary journal. Like XXL magazine edited by Rhodes Scholars at Oxford or Vanity Fair edited in the South Bronx at the Point.

The premiere edition includes new short stories by Greg Tate, Donnell Alexander, and Michael A. Gonzales; an essay on the nature of Christ by KRS-One; a comparison/contrast essay on television’s Girlfriends and Sex and the City by Ferentz Lafargue; Caille Millner assaying the Korean black hair-care market; and poetic short fiction from muMs.

The journal’s unifying aesthetic is summed up in its tagline: Bronx Biannual—the Journal of Urbane Urban Literature. Once upon a time, hip-hop culture was a gritty, inner-city, youth-only movement. But the hip-hop generation has come of age and is now the driving force in today’s worldwide pop culture. The fervor sweeping hip-hop encompasses more than just rap music. So Bronx broadens the charter to include everything the music touches, embraces, or informs: politics, movies, television, journalism, sports, crime, groupies, pimps, drugs, and all the other forms of hip-hop America’s social behavior, pathological and otherwise. Bronx is a new urban literary journalism including strong fiction, some humor, and a combination of literary, artistic, theatrical, political, and cultural matters. The Bronx spawned the hip-hop zeitgeist; Bronx Biannual will birth the modern urbane urban lit.

Bronx Biannual Issue No. 2 is also available from Akashic Books.

Extras

Book Details

  • Paperback: 250 pages
  • Published: 6/1/06
  • IBSN: 9781933354040

Author

MILES MARSHALL LEWIS was born in the Bronx in 1970 and currently splits his time between New York City and Paris, France. He is the author of Scars of the Soul Are Why Kids Wear Bandages When They Don’t Have Bruises and There’s a Riot Goin’ On, the editor of Bronx Biannual and Bronx Biannual 2, and is a former editor of Vibe and XXL. His work has been published in The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, LA Weekly, the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Essence, and other publications.

More info »