PAKET UMROH BULAN FEBRUARI MARET APRIL MEI 2018

saco-indonesia.com, Curiosity Rovers yang bertugas di Mars juga pernah terancam hancur saat mendarat di sana. Oleh karenanya, para peneliti dari NASA ingin mencoba meminimalisir hal ini dengan membuat robot baru.

NASA telah mengembangkan sebuah konsep tulang robot yang mampu untuk menyerap getaran sehingga robot tidak rusak. Uniknya, tulang ini juga terlihat ringkih di luar, namun sebenarnya sangat kuat.

Tulang tersebut dalam sebuah simulasi mampu memantul di permukaan tidak rata. Hal ini berguna untuk dapat mengurangi benturan yang bisa merusak.

Sampai saat ini sendiri para peneliti juga masih harus menguji sejauh mana konsep tersebut bisa diterapkan. Jika sudah jadi, maka Mars pun akan 'dijajah'oleh robot-robot seperti ini di masa mendatang.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

Kapolda Jawa Barat Irjen Mohammad Iriawan menegaskan pelaku penembak Briptu Nurul Affandi yakni berinisial KK dan S adalah spesialis pencurian sepeda motor (curanmor). Keduanya sudah sering keluar masuk penjara dalam kasus serupa.

"Pelaku berinisial KK yang ditangkap di Lampung Timur, Lampung pada Senin (27/1) subuh, perannya hanya sebatas joki atau yang membawa motor. Justru S lah sebagai pelaku utama dan yang hingga saat ini masih buron," kata Iriawan di Bogor, Selasa (28/1).

Lebih lanjut ia menjelaskan, KK ditangkap setelah pihaknya bersama Polda Jabar, Polda Metro, Polda Lampung, Polres Bogor dan Depok melakukan penyelidikan yang cukup lama.

"Saat ditangkap di rumahnya, kita juga berhasil mengamankan barang bukti 10 sepeda motor yang diduga hasil curian," katanya.

Saat ini pihaknya masih melakukan pengembangan, untuk mengejar pelaku utama berinisial S. "Untuk sementara tidak ada motif lain. Ini murni pencurian sepeda motor, karena pelaku kepergok hendak mencuri sepeda motor dan ditegur oleh korban," ungkapnya.

Iriawan menambahkan, tidak menutup kemungkinan ada pelaku lain dalam kasus penembakan ini. "Maka dari itu kita masih melakukan penyelidikan dan pengembangan. Tapi yang jelas pelaku ini adalah pernah masuk penjara atau residivis," katanya.

Seperti diberitakan sebelumnya, Briptu Nurul Affandi anggota Unit Reserse dan Kriminal Polsek Klapanunggal tewas ditembak saat mempergoki pelaku pencurian sepeda motor di samping warung gado-gado dekat PT Nippres, Jalan Raya Narogong, Klapanunggal, Kabupaten Bogor, Jumat (10/1).

saco-indonesia.com, Memberikan informasi dan himbauan kepada masyarakat tentang berantas pembajakan akan terus dilakukan oleh musisi senior Sam Bimbo. Kali ini ia juga akan menggiatkan masyarakat untuk tidak akan mendownload lagu secara ilegal melalui internet.

"Mudah-mudahan sistem ini juga bisa menjawab keresahan musisi. Dan dengan kemajuan teknologi jugq bisa memberikan cara baru," ujarnya ketika acara launching musiklegal.com di The East Post Kitchen Resto, Mega Kuningan, Jakarta Selatan.

Tak seperti RBT yang menurutnya sangat merugikan penyanyi atau musisi karena tidak adanya transparansi. Lewat sistem ini, lagu-lagu yang dipakai, juga akan bisa diketahui bersama.

"Dari PH, kaset, CD dan saya optimis akan bisa transparan berapa banyak orang yang akan memakai lagu kami nantinya. Jadi melalui print out yang bisa kami lihat jumlahnya dan ini juga merupakan harapan besa yangr bisa mendapatkan hasil dari yang kami harapkan selama ini," tuturnya.

Ia juga berharap cara ini juga bisa menanggulangi pembajakan lewat dunia maya. Pasalnya, selama 30 tahun berkarya, ia juga merasakan pembajakan malah makin merajalela.

"Saya sangat kecewa, mengatasi pembajak ini. Sampai 30 tahun berkarya pembajak, tidak pernah dipenjara. Sampai di sana ditabok duit lalu mereka bisa lenggang, jadi tidak ada pidana tapi perdata," lanjutnya.

"Kami sekarang juga masih jemput bola. Ada cerita nih, dia musisi luar, hanya memiliki satu lagu, tapi dia bisa kaya karena karya masih tetap dikenang hingga sampai saat ini. Sampai-sampai dia (musisi tadi) juga bisa membeli 3 pulau dari karya yang pernah dibuatnya," tandas Sam.

Editor : dian sukmawati
Sumber : kapanlagi.com

Salah satu sarana untuk menuju Haji Mabrur adalah memilih biro perjalanan haji yang bonafide, mau melayani jamaah haji dengan sepenuh hati, dan membimbing ibadah haji sesuai ajaran Nabi saw.

Trevel haji seperti itulah yang senantiasa dibutuhkan oleh para jamaah haji, sehingga ketika jamaah haji ingin melaksanakan ibadah, mereka bisa lebih khusyuk dan meresapi nilai-nilai ibadah.

Di antara sekian banyak biro trevel yang ada, yaitu Hikmah Sakti Perdana yang sudah berpengalaman dalam mengurusi jamaah haji dan umroh. Banyak paket-paket umroh yang ditawarkan kepada para jamaah.

Bagi yang ingin berhaji atauh umroh, dapat menghubungi kantor perwakilan Hikmah Sakti Perdana di: Pondok Pesantren Syafi’i Akrom, desa Jenggot Kota Pekalongan. Nomor kontak: 081542179705 (Yasir).

Sumber : http://ibadahhaji.wordpress.com

saco-indonesia.com, Penyakit flu termasuk jenis penyakit yang dapat menular yang disebabkan oleh virus RNA dari family Orthomyxoviridae yang biasanya menyerang unggas dan mamalia.

Orang yang sedang mengidap sakit flu akan mengalami gejala umum seperti nyeri otot, nyeri kepala berat, batuk, kelemahan tubuh, nyeri tenggorokan, dan lainnya.

Penyakit flu ini juga lebih berat jika dibandingkan salesma dimana biasanya diasumsikan sama oleh banyak orang. Kebanyakannya, penyakit flu ini telah mengalami penularan melalui udara melalui batuk atau bersin yang dapat menimbulkan aerosol yang mengandung virus didalamnya.

Influenza ini juga bisa ditularkan lewat kontak langsung dengan tinja burung atau ingus ataupun dengan kontak melalui permukaan yang telah terkontaminasi. Virus influenza ini juga bisa diinaktivasi oleh sinar matahari, deterjen, dan disinfektan.

Virus influenza telah menyebar ke seantero dunia dalam epidemi musiman yang dapat menimbulkan kematian antara 250.000-500.000 orang dalam setiap tahunnya.

Di AS, dalam setiap tahunnya rata-rata orang meninggal sebanyak 41.400 orang yang disebabkan oleh influenza dalam kurun waktu antara tahun 1979 sampai 2001.

Makanya jangan anggap enteng influenza karena kalau tidak ditangani serius dan tepat akan menimbulkan resiko yang berat bahkan sampai menimbulkan kematian.

Untuk itu, para penderita penyakit flu selain mengobatinya dengan obat-obatan dari dokter direkomendasikan juga untuk dapat membantu mengatasinya dengan beberapa makanan yang dianjurkan di bawah ini.

Menurut penelitian, beberapa jenis makanan ini telah memiliki kemampuan untuk dapat mengobati penyakit flu yang menyerang manusia. Apa saja makanan ini?
Es Lilin

Es lilin dingin ternyata juga bisa menenangkan tenggorokan yang bengkak, terasa nyeri, dan juga kering. Hal tersebut juga sangat membantu Anda tetap terhidrasi dimana merupakan kunci ketika sakit flu sedang melanda.

Mendapatkan cairan yang cukup bisa menjaga lendir tipis dan dapat membantu dalam mengurangi penyumbatan pada hidung. Oleh sebab itu, cobalah Anda untuk mengonsumsi es lilin yang terbuat dari 100% jus buah untuk dapat memastikan bahwa dalam es tersebut telah memiliki kandungan nutrisi yang sangat bermanfaat buat tubuh.
Jus Sayuran

Ketika Anda tengah merasakan flu berat, maka mencoba untuk mengonsumsi jus sayuran ialah pilihan yang sangat tepat karena berfungsi untuk dapat meningkatkan kekebalan tubuh serta menjaga supaya tubuh agar tetap terhidrasi. Kalau tak suka dengan jus sayuran maka jus buah murni pun juga bisa diandalkan.
Sandwich Kalkun

Kalkun juga merupakan sumber protein yang sangat baik dan tidak berlemak yang sangat penting untuk kebutuhan nutrisi tubuh. Cobalah makan sandwich kalkun karena sangat bermanfaat dalam memberikan energi bagi tubuh ketika melawan penyakit.
Bawang Putih

Mungkin tak banyak yang menyangka bahwa ternyata Bawang Putih juga bisa dimanfaatkan untuk dapat mengobati penyakit flu. Mengapa?

Karena bawang Putih telah memiliki sifat anti-mikroba dan merangsang kekebalan tubuh sehingga sangat efektif untuk dapat menghalau serangan penyakit flu. Bawang Putih juga sangat berperan dalam mengatasi penyumbatan di hidung.
Jahe

Dalam beberapa penelitian telah terungkap bahwa Jahe juga sangat berperan dalam membantu melawan peradangan. Makanya menambahkan bumbu Jahe terhadap makanan yang akan disantap ketika Anda flu bisa bermanfaat dalam meringankan penyakit tersebut.
Pisang

Pisang juga merupakan sumber energi yang sangat besar bagi tubuh. Ketika Anda flu, kerap kali telah terjadi kelemasan atau lemah dan hal ini juga bisa diatasi dengan mengonsumsi buah pisang.

Biasanya, dokter juga sering menyarankan supaya ketika sudah pulih dari flu, sebelum makan makanan padat sebaiknya memakan pisang terlebih dahulu.

Itulah beberapa makanan yang bermanfaat untuk dapat meringankan penyakit flu yang sedang menyerang Anda. Memang mengonsumsi obat-obatan dari dokter atau dari warung juga dianjurkan untuk dapat mempercepat pengobatan flu Anda. Namun, mengombinasikannya dengan makanan alami yang juga sangat bermanfaat dalam meredam sakit flu juga tidak ada salahnya.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati
Sumber : www.deherba.com

Ms. Rendell was a prolific writer of intricately plotted mystery novels that combined psychological insight, social conscience and teeth-chattering terror.

Mr. Mankiewicz, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter for “I Want to Live!,” also wrote episodes of television shows such as “Star Trek” and “Marcus Welby, M.D.”

A 214-pound Queens housewife struggled with a lifelong addiction to food until she shed 72 pounds and became the public face of the worldwide weight-control empire Weight Watchers.

Mr. King sang for the Drifters and found success as a solo performer with hits like “Spanish Harlem.”

A lapsed seminarian, Mr. Chambers succeeded Saul Alinsky as leader of the social justice umbrella group Industrial Areas Foundation.

Gagne wrestled professionally from the late 1940s until the 1980s and was a transitional figure between the early 20th century barnstormers and the steroidal sideshows of today

The magical quality Mr. Lesnie created in shooting the “Babe” films caught the eye of the director Peter Jackson, who chose him to film the fantasy epic.

Late in April, after Native American actors walked off in disgust from the set of Adam Sandler’s latest film, a western sendup that its distributor, Netflix, has defended as being equally offensive to all, a glow of pride spread through several Native American communities.

Tantoo Cardinal, a Canadian indigenous actress who played Black Shawl in “Dances With Wolves,” recalled thinking to herself, “It’s come.” Larry Sellers, who starred as Cloud Dancing in the 1990s television show “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” thought, “It’s about time.” Jesse Wente, who is Ojibwe and directs film programming at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, found himself encouraged and surprised. There are so few film roles for indigenous actors, he said, that walking off the set of a major production showed real mettle.

But what didn’t surprise Mr. Wente was the content of the script. According to the actors who walked off the set, the film, titled “The Ridiculous Six,” included a Native American woman who passes out and is revived after white men douse her with alcohol, and another woman squatting to urinate while lighting a peace pipe. “There’s enough history at this point to have set some expectations around these sort of Hollywood depictions,” Mr. Wente said.

The walkout prompted a rhetorical “What do you expect from an Adam Sandler film?,” and a Netflix spokesman said that in the movie, blacks, Mexicans and whites were lampooned as well. But Native American actors and critics said a broader issue was at stake. While mainstream portrayals of native peoples have, Mr. Wente said, become “incrementally better” over the decades, he and others say, they remain far from accurate and reflect a lack of opportunities for Native American performers. What’s more, as Native Americans hunger for representation on screen, critics say the absence of three-dimensional portrayals has very real off-screen consequences.

“Our people are still healing from historical trauma,” said Loren Anthony, one of the actors who walked out. “Our youth are still trying to figure out who they are, where they fit in this society. Kids are killing themselves. They’re not proud of who they are.” They also don’t, he added, see themselves on prime time television or the big screen. Netflix noted while about five people walked off the “The Ridiculous Six” set, 100 or so Native American actors and extras stayed.

But in interviews, nearly a dozen Native American actors and film industry experts said that Mr. Sandler’s humor perpetuated decades-old negative stereotypes. Mr. Anthony said such depictions helped feed the despondency many Native Americans feel, with deadly results: Native Americans have the highest suicide rate out of all the country’s ethnicities.

The on-screen problem is twofold, Mr. Anthony and others said: There’s a paucity of roles for Native Americans — according to the Screen Actors Guild in 2008 they accounted for 0.3 percent of all on-screen parts (those figures have yet to be updated), compared to about 2 percent of the general population — and Native American actors are often perceived in a narrow way.

In his Peabody Award-winning documentary “Reel Injun,” the Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond explored Hollywood depictions of Native Americans over the years, and found they fell into a few stereotypical categories: the Noble Savage, the Drunk Indian, the Mystic, the Indian Princess, the backward tribal people futilely fighting John Wayne and manifest destiny. While the 1990 film “Dances With Wolves” won praise for depicting Native Americans as fully fleshed out human beings, not all indigenous people embraced it. It was still told, critics said, from the colonialists’ point of view. In an interview, John Trudell, a Santee Sioux writer, actor (“Thunderheart”) and the former chairman of the American Indian Movement, described the film as “a story of two white people.”

“God bless ‘Dances with Wolves,’ ” Michael Horse, who played Deputy Hawk in “Twin Peaks,” said sarcastically. “Even ‘Avatar.’ Someone’s got to come save the tribal people.”

Dan Spilo, a partner at Industry Entertainment who represents Adam Beach, one of today’s most prominent Native American actors, said while typecasting dogs many minorities, it is especially intractable when it comes to Native Americans. Casting directors, he said, rarely cast them as police officers, doctors or lawyers. “There’s the belief that the Native American character should be on reservations or riding a horse,” he said.

“We don’t see ourselves,” Mr. Horse said. “We’re still an antiquated culture to them, and to the rest of the world.”

Ms. Cardinal said she was once turned down for the role of the wife of a child-abusing cop because the filmmakers felt that casting her would somehow be “too political.”

Another sore point is the long run of white actors playing American Indians, among them Burt Lancaster, Rock Hudson, Audrey Hepburn and, more recently, Johnny Depp, whose depiction of Tonto in the 2013 film “Lone Ranger,” was viewed as racist by detractors. There are, of course, exceptions. The former A&E series “Longmire,” which, as it happens, will now be on Netflix, was roundly praised for its depiction of life on a Northern Cheyenne reservation, with Lou Diamond Phillips, who is of Cherokee descent, playing a Northern Cheyenne man.

Others also point to the success of Mr. Beach, who played a Mohawk detective in “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and landed a starring role in the forthcoming D C Comics picture “Suicide Squad.” Mr. Beach said he had come across insulting scripts backed by people who don’t see anything wrong with them.

“I’d rather starve than do something that is offensive to my ancestral roots,” Mr. Beach said. “But I think there will always be attempts to drawn on the weakness of native people’s struggles. The savage Indian will always be the savage Indian. The white man will always be smarter and more cunning. The cavalry will always win.”

The solution, Mr. Wente, Mr. Trudell and others said, lies in getting more stories written by and starring Native Americans. But Mr. Wente noted that while independent indigenous film has blossomed in the last two decades, mainstream depictions have yet to catch up. “You have to stop expecting for Hollywood to correct it, because there seems to be no ability or desire to correct it,” Mr. Wente said.

There have been calls to boycott Netflix but, writing for Indian Country Today Media Network, which first broke news of the walk off, the filmmaker Brian Young noted that the distributor also offered a number of films by or about Native Americans.

The furor around “The Ridiculous Six” may drive more people to see it. Then one of the questions that Mr. Trudell, echoing others, had about the film will be answered: “Who the hell laughs at this stuff?”

THE WRITERS ASHLEY AND JAQUAVIS COLEMAN know the value of a good curtain-raiser. The couple have co-authored dozens of novels, and they like to start them with a bang: a headlong action sequence, a blast of violence or sex that rocks readers back on their heels. But the Colemans concede they would be hard-pressed to dream up anything more gripping than their own real-life opening scene.

In the summer of 2001, JaQuavis Coleman was a 16-year-old foster child in Flint, Mich., the former auto-manufacturing mecca that had devolved, in the wake of General Motors’ plant closures, into one of the country’s most dangerous cities, with a decimated economy and a violent crime rate more than three times the national average. When JaQuavis was 8, social services had removed him from his mother’s home. He spent years bouncing between foster families. At 16, JaQuavis was also a businessman: a crack dealer with a network of street-corner peddlers in his employ.

One day that summer, JaQuavis met a fellow dealer in a parking lot on Flint’s west side. He was there to make a bulk sale of a quarter-brick, or “nine-piece” — a nine-ounce parcel of cocaine, with a street value of about $11,000. In the middle of the transaction, JaQuavis heard the telltale chirp of a walkie-talkie. His customer, he now realized, was an undercover policeman. JaQuavis jumped into his car and spun out onto the road, with two unmarked police cars in pursuit. He didn’t want to get into a high-speed chase, so he whipped his car into a church parking lot and made a run for it, darting into an alleyway behind a row of small houses, where he tossed the quarter-brick into some bushes. When JaQuavis reached the small residential street on the other side of the houses, he was greeted by the police, who handcuffed him and went to search behind the houses where, they told him, they were certain he had ditched the drugs. JaQuavis had been dealing since he was 12, had amassed more than $100,000 and had never been arrested. Now, he thought: It’s over.

But when the police looked in the bushes, they couldn’t find any cocaine. They interrogated JaQuavis, who denied having ever possessed or sold drugs. They combed the backyard alley some more. After an hour of fruitless efforts, the police were forced to unlock the handcuffs and release their suspect.

JaQuavis was baffled by the turn of events until the next day, when he received a phone call. The previous afternoon, a 15-year-old girl had been sitting in her home on the west side of Flint when she heard sirens. She looked out of the window of her bedroom, and watched a young man throw a package in the bushes behind her house. She recognized him. He was a high school classmate — a handsome, charismatic boy whom she had admired from afar. The girl crept outside and grabbed the bundle, which she hid in her basement. “I have something that belongs to you,” Ashley Snell told JaQuavis Coleman when she reached him by phone. “You wanna come over here and pick it up?”

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In the Colemans’ first novel, “Dirty Money” (2005), they told a version of this story. The outline was the same: the drug deal gone bad, the dope chucked in the bushes, the fateful phone call. To the extent that the authors took poetic license, it was to tone down the meet-cute improbability of the true-life events. In “Dirty Money,” the girl, Anari, and the crack dealer, Maurice, circle each other warily for a year or so before coupling up. But the facts of Ashley and JaQuavis’s romance outstripped pulp fiction. They fell in love more or less at first sight, moved into their own apartment while still in high school and were married in 2008. “We were together from the day we met,” Ashley says. “I don’t think we’ve spent more than a week apart in total over the past 14 years.”

That partnership turned out to be creative and entrepreneurial as well as romantic. Over the past decade, the Colemans have published nearly 50 books, sometimes as solo writers, sometimes under pseudonyms, but usually as collaborators with a byline that has become a trusted brand: “Ashley & JaQuavis.” They are marquee stars of urban fiction, or street lit, a genre whose inner-city settings and lurid mix of crime, sex and sensationalism have earned it comparisons to gangsta rap. The emergence of street lit is one of the big stories in recent American publishing, a juggernaut that has generated huge sales by catering to a readership — young, black and, for the most part, female — that historically has been ill-served by the book business. But the genre is also widely maligned. Street lit is subject to a kind of triple snobbery: scorned by literati who look down on genre fiction generally, ignored by a white publishing establishment that remains largely indifferent to black books and disparaged by African-American intellectuals for poor writing, coarse values and trafficking in racial stereotypes.

But if a certain kind of cultural prestige is shut off to the Colemans, they have reaped other rewards. They’ve built a large and loyal fan base, which gobbles up the new Ashley & JaQuavis titles that arrive every few months. Many of those books are sold at street-corner stands and other off-the-grid venues in African-American neighborhoods, a literary gray market that doesn’t register a blip on best-seller tallies. Yet the Colemans’ most popular series now regularly crack the trade fiction best-seller lists of The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. For years, the pair had no literary agent; they sold hundreds of thousands of books without banking a penny in royalties. Still, they have earned millions of dollars, almost exclusively from cash-for-manuscript deals negotiated directly with independent publishing houses. In short, though little known outside of the world of urban fiction, the Colemans are one of America’s most successful literary couples, a distinction they’ve achieved, they insist, because of their work’s gritty authenticity and their devotion to a primal literary virtue: the power of the ripping yarn.

“When you read our books, you’re gonna realize: ‘Ashley & JaQuavis are storytellers,’ ” says Ashley. “Our tales will get your heart pounding.”

THE COLEMANS’ HOME BASE — the cottage from which they operate their cottage industry — is a spacious four-bedroom house in a genteel suburb about 35 miles north of downtown Detroit. The house is plush, but when I visited this past winter, it was sparsely appointed. The couple had just recently moved in, and had only had time to fully furnish the bedroom of their 4-year-old son, Quaye.

In conversation, Ashley and JaQuavis exude both modesty and bravado: gratitude for their good fortune and bootstrappers’ pride in having made their own luck. They talk a lot about their time in the trenches, the years they spent as a drug dealer and “ride-or-die girl” tandem. In Flint they learned to “grind hard.” Writing, they say, is merely a more elevated kind of grind.

“Instead of hitting the block like we used to, we hit the laptops,” says Ashley. “I know what every word is worth. So while I’m writing, I’m like: ‘Okay, there’s a hundred dollars. There’s a thousand dollars. There’s five thousand dollars.’ ”

They maintain a rigorous regimen. They each try to write 5,000 words per day, five days a week. The writers stagger their shifts: JaQuavis goes to bed at 7 p.m. and wakes up early, around 3 or 4 in the morning, to work while his wife and child sleep. Ashley writes during the day, often in libraries or at Starbucks.

They divide the labor in other ways. Chapters are divvied up more or less equally, with tasks assigned according to individual strengths. (JaQuavis typically handles character development. Ashley loves writing murder scenes.) The results are stitched together, with no editorial interference from one author in the other’s text. The real work, they contend, is the brainstorming. The Colemans spend weeks mapping out their plot-driven books — long conversations that turn into elaborate diagrams on dry-erase boards. “JaQuavis and I are so close, it makes the process real easy,” says Ashley. “Sometimes when I’m thinking of something, a plot point, he’ll say it out loud, and I’m like: ‘Wait — did I say that?’ ”

Their collaboration developed by accident, and on the fly. Both were bookish teenagers. Ashley read lots of Judy Blume and John Grisham; JaQuavis liked Shakespeare, Richard Wright and “Atlas Shrugged.” (Their first official date was at a Borders bookstore, where Ashley bought “The Coldest Winter Ever,” the Sister Souljah novel often credited with kick-starting the contemporary street-lit movement.) In 2003, Ashley, then 17, was forced to terminate an ectopic pregnancy. She was bedridden for three weeks, and to provide distraction and boost her spirits, JaQuavis challenged his girlfriend to a writing contest. “She just wasn’t talking. She was laying in bed. I said, ‘You know what? I bet you I could write a better book than you.’ My wife is real competitive. So I said, ‘Yo, all right, $500 bet.’ And I saw her eyes spark, like, ‘What?! You can’t write no better book than me!’ So I wrote about three chapters. She wrote about three chapters. Two days later, we switched.”

The result, hammered out in a few days, would become “Dirty Money.” Two years later, when Ashley and JaQuavis were students at Ferris State University in Western Michigan, they sold the manuscript to Urban Books, a street-lit imprint founded by the best-selling author Carl Weber. At the time, JaQuavis was still making his living selling drugs. When Ashley got the phone call informing her that their book had been bought, she assumed they’d hit it big, and flushed more than $10,000 worth of cocaine down the toilet. Their advance was a mere $4,000.

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Those advances would soon increase, eventually reaching five and six figures. The Colemans built their career, JaQuavis says, in a manner that made sense to him as a veteran dope peddler: by flooding the street with product. From the start, they were prolific, churning out books at a rate of four or five a year. Their novels made their way into stores; the now-defunct chain Waldenbooks, which had stores in urban areas typically bypassed by booksellers, was a major engine of the street-lit market. But Ashley and JaQuavis took advantage of distribution channels established by pioneering urban fiction authors such as Teri Woods and Vickie Stringer, and a network of street-corner tables, magazine stands, corner shops and bodegas. Like rappers who establish their bona fides with gray-market mixtapes, street-lit authors use this system to circumnavigate industry gatekeepers, bringing their work straight to the genre’s core readership. But urban fiction has other aficionados, in less likely places. “Our books are so popular in the prison system,” JaQuavis says. “We’re banned in certain penitentiaries. Inmates fight over the books — there are incidents, you know? I have loved ones in jail, and they’re like: ‘Yo, your books can’t come in here. It’s against the rules.’ ”

The appeal of the Colemans’ work is not hard to fathom. The books are formulaic and taut; they deliver the expected goods efficiently and exuberantly. The titles telegraph the contents: “Diary of a Street Diva,” “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” “Murderville.” The novels serve up a stream of explicit sex and violence in a slangy, tangy, profane voice. In Ashley & JaQuavis’s books people don’t get killed: they get “popped,” “laid out,” get their “cap twisted back.” The smut is constant, with emphasis on the earthy, sticky, olfactory particulars. Romance novel clichés — shuddering orgasms, heroic carnal feats, superlative sexual skill sets — are rendered in the Colemans’ punchy patois.

Subtlety, in other words, isn’t Ashley & JaQuavis’s forte. But their books do have a grainy specificity. In “The Cartel” (2008), the first novel in the Colemans’ best-selling saga of a Miami drug syndicate, they catch the sights and smells of a crack workshop in a housing project: the nostril-stinging scent of cocaine and baking soda bubbling on stovetops; the teams of women, stripped naked except for hospital masks so they can’t pilfer the merchandise, “cutting up the cooked coke on the round wood table.” The subject matter is dark, but the Colemans’ tone is not quite noir. Even in the grimmest scenes, the mood is high-spirited, with the writers palpably relishing the lewd and gory details: the bodies writhing in boudoirs and crumpling under volleys of bullets, the geysers of blood and other bodily fluids.

The luridness of street lit has made it a flashpoint, inciting controversy reminiscent of the hip-hop culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. But the street-lit debate touches deeper historical roots, reviving decades-old arguments in black literary circles about the mandate to uplift the race and present wholesome images of African-Americans. In 1928, W. E. B. Du Bois slammed the “licentiousness” of “Home to Harlem,” Claude McKay’s rollicking novel of Harlem nightlife. McKay’s book, Du Bois wrote, “for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” Similar sentiments have greeted 21st-century street lit. In a 2006 New York Times Op-Ed essay, the journalist and author Nick Chiles decried “the sexualization and degradation of black fiction.” African-American bookstores, Chiles complained, are “overrun with novels that . . . appeal exclusively to our most prurient natures — as if these nasty books were pairing off back in the stockrooms like little paperback rabbits and churning out even more graphic offspring that make Ralph Ellison books cringe into a dusty corner.”

Copulating paperbacks aside, it’s clear that the street-lit debate is about more than literature, touching on questions of paternalism versus populism, and on middle-class anxieties about the black underclass. “It’s part and parcel of black elites’ efforts to define not only a literary tradition, but a racial politics,” said Kinohi Nishikawa, an assistant professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University. “There has always been a sense that because African-Americans’ opportunities to represent themselves are so limited in the first place, any hint of criminality or salaciousness would necessarily be a knock on the entire racial politics. One of the pressing debates about African-American literature today is: If we can’t include writers like Ashley & JaQuavis, to what extent is the foundation of our thinking about black literature faulty? Is it just a literature for elites? Or can it be inclusive, bringing urban fiction under the purview of our umbrella term ‘African-American literature’?”

Defenders of street lit note that the genre has a pedigree: a tradition of black pulp fiction that stretches from Chester Himes, the midcentury author of hardboiled Harlem detective stories, to the 1960s and ’70s “ghetto fiction” of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, to the current wave of urban fiction authors. Others argue for street lit as a social good, noting that it attracts a large audience that might otherwise never read at all. Scholars like Nishikawa link street lit to recent studies showing increased reading among African-Americans. A 2014 Pew Research Center report found that a greater percentage of black Americans are book readers than whites or Latinos.

For their part, the Colemans place their work in the broader black literary tradition. “You have Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, James Baldwin — all of these traditional black writers, who wrote about the struggles of racism, injustice, inequality,” says Ashley. “We’re writing about the struggle as it happens now. It’s just a different struggle. I’m telling my story. I’m telling the struggle of a black girl from Flint, Michigan, who grew up on welfare.”

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Perhaps there is a high-minded case to be made for street lit. But the virtues of Ashley & JaQuavis’s work are more basic. Their novels do lack literary polish. The writing is not graceful; there are passages of clunky exposition and sex scenes that induce guffaws and eye rolls. But the pleasure quotient is high. The books flaunt a garish brand of feminism, with women characters cast not just as vixens, but also as gangsters — cold-blooded killers, “murder mamas.” The stories are exceptionally well-plotted. “The Cartel” opens by introducing its hero, the crime boss Carter Diamond; on page 9, a gunshot spatters Diamond’s brain across the interior of a police cruiser. The book then flashes back seven years and begins to hurtle forward again — a bullet train, whizzing readers through shifting alliances, romantic entanglements and betrayals, kidnappings, shootouts with Haitian and Dominican gangsters, and a cliffhanger closing scene that leaves the novel’s heroine tied to a chair in a basement, gruesomely tortured to the edge of death. Ashley & JaQuavis’s books are not Ralph Ellison, certainly, but they build up quite a head of steam. They move.

The Colemans are moving themselves these days. They recently signed a deal with St. Martin’s Press, which will bring out the next installment in the “Cartel” series as well as new solo series by both writers. The St. Martin’s deal is both lucrative and legitimizing — a validation of Ashley and JaQuavis’s work by one of publishing’s most venerable houses. The Colemans’ ambitions have grown, as well. A recent trilogy, “Murderville,” tackles human trafficking and the blood-diamond industry in West Africa, with storylines that sweep from Sierra Leone to Mexico to Los Angeles. Increasingly, Ashley & JaQuavis are leaning on research — traveling to far-flung settings and hitting the books in the libraries — and spending less time mining their own rough-and-tumble past.

But Flint remains a source of inspiration. One evening not long ago, JaQuavis led me on a tour of his hometown: a popular roadside bar; the parking lot where he met the undercover cop for the ill-fated drug deal; Ashley’s old house, the site of his almost-arrest. He took me to a ramshackle vehicle repair shop on Flint’s west side, where he worked as a kid, washing cars. He showed me a bathroom at the rear of the garage, where, at age 12, he sneaked away to inspect the first “boulder” of crack that he ever sold. A spray-painted sign on the garage wall, which JaQuavis remembered from his time at the car wash, offered words of warning:

WHAT EVERY YOUNG MAN SHOULD KNOW
ABOUT USING A GUN:
MURDER . . . 30 Years
ARMED ROBBERY . . . 15 Years
ASSAULT . . . 15 Years
RAPE . . . 20 Years
POSSESSION . . . 5 Years
JACKING . . . 20 YEARS

“We still love Flint, Michigan,” JaQuavis says. “It’s so seedy, so treacherous. But there’s some heart in this city. This is where it all started, selling books out the box. In the days when we would get those little $40,000 advances, they’d send us a couple boxes of books for free. We would hit the streets to sell our books, right out of the car trunk. It was a hustle. It still is.”

One old neighborhood asset that the Colemans have not shaken off is swagger. “My wife is the best female writer in the game,” JaQuavis told me. “I believe I’m the best male writer in the game. I’m sleeping next to the best writer in the world. And she’s doing the same.”

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David Goldman/Associated Press

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