Posted Date: July 2, 2008

Best-Selling Author Decries Popular Black Adult Fiction

  New York bestselling author Omar Tyree, who has published 15 books and has sold more than 1.5 million copies worldwide, says he feels like the man who created the monster Frankenstein.
   Tyree broke ground in the early 90s when he began writing contemporary urban-themed novels about African Americans, but “things have gotten way out of hand,” he said in a recent release he wrote about the current market flood of books that are called "street literature".
   Tyree says, “it's now time to put up my pen and move on to something new, until the readership is ready to develop a liking for fresh material on other subjects.”
   “When I began to publish ground breaking contemporary novels with Flyy Girl in 1993, and Capital City in 1994, I called them ‘urban classics.’ They were ‘urban’ because they dealt with people of color in the inner-city or ‘urban’ population areas. They were ‘classics’ because I considered myself one of the first to start the work of a new era.”
Now, however, after sixteen years and sixteen novels in the African-American adult urban fiction game, the best-selling author is fed up with books detailing “gold-digging, ghetto girl, gangster love, drug-dealer stories”.
   Tyree says he can't knock writers who became inspired by his earlier works and followed his style. “But after awhile, as dozens of other new writers began to follow in their footsteps, I had to seriously ask myself, ‘Don't we have some other things to write about it?’”

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