Word: wan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When St. Martin's press begins promoting the latest work from novelist K'wan next month, the campaign won't look like the marketing for, say, the corporate thrillers of Joseph Finder. Funkmaster Flex, the hip-hop evangelist, is closer to the flavor. K'wan's reading audience is loyal--he has more than 400,000 books in print. But titles like Gangsta, Road Dawgz and his latest, Hood Rat, have captured an audience well outside St. Martin's usual purview. So instead of signings at Barnes & Noble, St. Martin's is planning giveaways and readings in barber shops...
...When they signed me, they were like, 'Great. We got him,'" says K'wan. "But they didn't really know what to do with me until now." St. Martin's isn't alone in that dilemma. For years, book publishers have catered to the $250 million African-American market with the aspirational stories of authors like Terry McMillan and Eric Jerome Dickey. But attracted by the gaudy numbers generated by the genre known as street lit, such publishers as Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Random House are hitting the pavement...
...graphic detail. Like gangsta rap, street lit often has thieves, pushers and prostitutes as protagonists. And like gangsta rap in its heyday, street lit is hot business. In an industry that considers sales of 20,000 copies of a typical novel a success, gritty street-lit authors like K'wan are routinely doubling that number...
...Spirits don't come much more generous than this. These days, Moss is not short of remunerative assignments if his prolific output of books and articles is anything to go by, and he is living in a spacious new home on Ma Wan-an outlying island of Hong Kong where slick new apartment blocks juxtapose a largely abandoned fishing village that was once the island's only settlement. From the highest colonial circles to a working-class estate to an island home that encapsulates the new Hong Kong as it hovers between the past and future: Moss's trajectory mirrors...
...Karr has now let the world into some of his secrets. On Wednesday evening, the wan, sandy-haired one-time grade school teacher arrived at Bangkok's Suan Phlu immigration pen, to spend the night in a solitary cell. The day before, a judge in Boulder, Colorado, had issued an arrest warrant for Karr in the nearly decade-old murder of JonBenet Ramsey, the six-year-old child beauty pageant contestant. Soon after, a small group of plainclothes Thai and U.S. officers arrived at his shabby apartment, where Karr had stayed since arriving from Malaysia in June, on the latest...