The publication of Sanyika Shakur's Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member in 1993 generated a huge amount of excitement in literary circles--New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani deemed it a "shocking and galvanic book"--and set off a new publishing trend of US gang memoirs in the 1990s. The memoirs showcased tales of violent confrontation and territorial belonging but also offered many of the first journalistic and autobiographical accounts of the much-mythologized gang subculture.

In Brothers Who Could Kill with Words, Josephine Metcalf focuses on three of these memoirs--Shakur's Monster; Luis J. Rodriguez's Always Running: La Vida Loca--Gang Days in LA; and Stanley "Tookie" Williams's Blue Rage, Black Redemption--as key representatives of the gang autobiography. Metcalf examines the conflict between the competing forces of violence and pedagogy at work within their pages. Contemporary gang memoirs have been variously demonized in the media as violent and sensationalist or, by contrast, praised as offering a pedagogic and preventative anti-gang stance. The narrative arcs of the memoirs themselves rest on the process of conversion from violent young gangbanger to nonviolent, enlightened citizens.

Metcalf analyzes the emergence, production, marketing, and reception of contemporary gang memoirs. Through interviews with Rodriguez, Shakur, and Barbara Cottman Becnel (Williams's editor), Metcalf articulates both the writing and publishing processes of these books. Brothers Who Could Kill with Words analyzes key narrative conventions of the genre, specifically how diction, dialogue, and narrative arcs shape the works and how they are consumed. This interdisciplinary study--fusing literary criticism, sociology, ethnography, reader-response study, and editorial theory--brings scholarly attention to bear on a popular, much-discussed but under-studied modern genre.