From one of the most revolutionary writers of the 20th century, the uncensored and gritty novel that inspired today\'s street lit and hip hop culture. --Michael Covino, The Village Voice.
It is the voice of the ghetto itself.
It is not the educated voice of a writer who has, so to speak, risen above his background.
They are almost unbearable.
Goines\' novels, on the other hand, are written from ground zero.
They brought news of one place to the residents of another.
All those other black] writers, no matter how well they dealt with black experience, appealed largely to an educated, middle-class, largely white readership.
By sixteen, his childhood abruptly ends, and he is a full-fledged pimp, cold-blooded and ruthless, battling to understand and live up to his mother\'s words, First be a man, then be a pimp.
By thirteen, Whoreson\'s a cardsharp.
At age twelve, his street education begins when a man named Fast Black schools him in trickology.
As a child, he\'s looked after by his neighborhood\'s imposing matriarch, Big Mama, while his mother works.
Whoreson Jones is the son of a beautiful black prostitute and an unknown white john.
There was nothing I could do about it, but even had I been able to, I wouldn\'t have changed it.
I began to understand just what my mother was doing for a living.
After my ninth birthday I began to really understand the meaning of my name.
From one of the most revolutionary writers of the 20th century, the uncensored and gritty novel that inspired today\'s street lit and hip hop culture
