I adore Street Literature. Urban Fiction. Hood Tales. However it’s named, I am beguiled by the candy coated covers featuring buxom bootied beauties, hard core handsomes, luxury sedans, dice, roses, champagne, racks on stacks on racks, city skylines and tropical silhouettes. Considering books as sculptural objects, I’ve created cover facsimiles that mimic the design and melodramatic text of these works. Urban fiction becomes an artistic model that I can manipulate as pure artifice. I’ve been so successful at these experiments that it is difficult to pinpoint the unreality of their existence as published works. Urban fiction will be deemed important through the passage of time, but it also feels significant in the contemporary context. Many of these (actual) works are self-published and tell stories customized to particular communities. By using a shared language and drawing from collective memory, they reveal modes of self-determination that are not commonly celebrated in the mainstream publishing world. I seek to acknowledge the beauty of this kind storytelling, explicitly. By using the ratchet fable I can create experiences of social value and collective story making.