saco-indonesia.com, Anggun C Sasmi merupakan penyanyi wanita Indonesia yang namanya juga sudah dikenal hingga mancanegara. Makan

saco-indonesia.com, Anggun C Sasmi merupakan penyanyi wanita Indonesia yang namanya juga sudah dikenal hingga mancanegara. Makanya banyak musisi yang ingin mencoba mengikuti jejaknya dalam hal bermusik, salah satunya Larra Sylvi.

"Menjadi penyanyi Internasional seperti Anggun adalah impianku," ujar Larra saat ditemui di FX Mal, Sudirman, Jakarta Pusat.

Makanya lewat single Kamu, dara kelahiran 16 Maret 1995 itu telah berharap akan bisa merealisasikan keinginannya untuk bisa membanggakan Indonesia dan tentu keluarga untuk dapat memulai go Internasional seperti Anggun.

"Semoga lewat single ini, aku juga bisa mengepakan sayap ku di industri musik Tanah Air. Dan juga dapat diterima oleh para pencinta musik," kata Larra.

Tentunya tidak mudah bagi Larra untuk menjadi seperti penyanyi idolanya. Maka itu dia juga mengaku butuh kritikan dari para penikmat musik tanah air agar bisa menjadikannya lebih matang.

"Terima (kritikan) banget. Malah aku suka minta dikritik. Ayo dong apa yang kurang. Kritikan itu sebenarnya sifatnya membangun, makanya aku ambil positifnya saja. Biar mental kuat juga," pungkasnya.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

perhitungan zakat menurut islam   1- Zakat Mata Uang Jika harta seseorang senilai 85 gram emas atau 595 gram

saco-indonesia.com, Nasib nahas telah menimpa seorang bocah Sekolah Dasar Negeri (SDN) Tugu Utara 22, Muhammad Badrul Tamam yang

saco-indonesia.com, Nasib nahas telah menimpa seorang bocah Sekolah Dasar Negeri (SDN) Tugu Utara 22, Muhammad Badrul Tamam yang berusia (7) tahun . Bocah kelas 2 SD tersebut tewas setelah terlindas truk kontainer yang bernomor polisi B 9899 UEH di Jalan Kratmat Jaya, Koja, Jakarta Utara, Selasa pagi.

Akibat dari kecelakaan yang telah terjadi sekitar pukul 09.45 WIB, telah mengakibatkan kepala Badrul pecah terlindas kontainer. Sang Ibu yang mengerem secara mendadak sepeda motor Honda Spacy biru B 3535 UAX untuk dapat mengindari lubang sedalam 20 sentimeter.

Salah satu guru Badrul, Yasin juga mengatakan, dirinya pertama kali mendengar kabar tersebut dari seorang guru lainnya di SDN 23 yang tidak jauh dari lokasi.

"Kebetulan ada guru olahraga SDN 23 yang pas mau berangkat ke sekolah ketika di Jalan Kramat Jaya dia lihat ada keramaian pas dilihat ternyata ada kecelakaan anak sekolah pakai baju sekolah SDN 22 tapi dia gak ngenalin wajahnya, kemudian dia langsung ke sekolah dan nemuin pimpinan kemudian saya langsung ke Rumah Sakit Pelabuhan Jakarta Utara," jelasnya, Selasa (28/1).

Selain itu, Yasin juga menuturkan, memang setiap hari sang ibu selalu mengantar dan menjemput anaknya ke sekolah, namun baru kali ini sang anak terlambat sekolah padahal jam masuk sekolah pukul 09.00 WIB.

"Baru mau berangkat sekolah, jam masuk sekolah itu pukul 09.00 WIB, dia memang setiap hari dianter Ibunya ke sekolah. Harusnya memang sudah masuk tapi baru kali ini telat," tandasnya.

Saat ini sang ibu telah mendapatkan perawatan intensif di Rumah Sakit Pelabuhan, Jakarta Utara karena telah mengalami luka-luka dan shock berat atas kejadian tersebut. Sedangkan jasad sang anak dibawa langsung ke RSCM untuk identifikasi lebih lanjut.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

saco-indonesia.com, Istri mediang Gus Dur atau KH Abdurrahman Wahid, Hj Sinta Nuriyah Wahid telah menegaskan, jika ada salah sat

saco-indonesia.com, Istri mediang Gus Dur atau KH Abdurrahman Wahid, Hj Sinta Nuriyah Wahid telah menegaskan, jika ada salah satu partai yang akan menggunakan gambar almarhum suaminya itu, sama saja dengan mencuri. Sebab, itu pernah diwasiatkan oleh Gus Dur sendiri, sebelum wafat. Siapa saja atau lembaga apapun untuk dapat disomasi jika menggunakan gambarnya.

Hal ini telah disampaikan oleh Sinta Nuriyah saat menjadi pembicara di acara Partai NasDem di Surabaya, Jawa Timur, Kamis (26/12). Menurut Sinta Nuriyah, dia dan almarhum suaminya itu tidak membatasi harus ada di mana.

"Saya juga mengatakan ada di mana-mana. Gus Dur juga ada di mana-mana. Saya ada di Hanura, ada di Gerindra, dan ada di partai manapun. Sekarang saya ada di Partai NasDem, kecuali di satu itu (PKB)," tegas Sinta.

Lalu kenapa gambar Gus Dur digunakan sebagai sarana untuk kampanye di Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa (PKB)? Pada baliho calon legislatif (caleg) dari PKB, terdapat gambar Gus Dur dan tulisan: Penerus Perjuangan Gus Dur.

"Saya telah menegaskan, sebelum wafat, Gus Dur berwasiat. Dalam surat wasiat yang telah ditulis melalui pengacara dan ditandatangani oleh Gus Dur itu, beliau berpesan: Barang siapa yang menggunakan gambar dan kata-kata beliau, maka mereka berhak disomasi. Itu harus disomasi," kata Sinta Nuriyah saat menceritakan isi surat wasiat Gus Dur yang telah dibuat pada tahun 2008 lalu , pasca dibuang oleh PKB.

Sementara dalam menghadapi Pemilu 2014 mendatang, PKB yang telah menyingkirkan Gus Dur justru mengklaim, sebagai partai penerus perjuangan Gus Dur.

Bahkan, Sinta Nuriyah telah menyatakan, penggunaan gambar itu sama saja dengan mencuri. Penggunaan gambar Gus Dur yang telah dilakukan oleh PKB itu tanpa izin dan sepengetahuan keluarga Gus Dur.

"Itu namanya nyolong (mencuri), dan harus segera di turunkan," tegas Sinta Nuriyah tanpa menyebut partai yang menggunakan simbol-simbol milik Gus Dur.

Cucu pendiri Nahdlatul Ulama itu, saat ini juga sudah menjadi milik bangsa Indonesia. Sebagai guru bangsa. Namun, kata Sinta Nuriyah, untuk wilayah politik, Gus Dur punya 'rumah' sendiri.

"Gus Dur memang sudah menjadi milik bangsa. Namun, untuk masalah politik, Gus Dur juga punya rumah sendiri. Jadi kalau ada yang menggunakan gambar dan kalimat Gus Dur untuk kepentingan politik, inilah yang harus disomasi," tandas dia.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati

Jasa Cuci Kursi Kantor di Jabodetabek ~ Kursi kantor juga merupakan salah satu element terpenting dalam sebuah kantor, kenyamana

Jasa Cuci Kursi Kantor di Jabodetabek ~ Kursi kantor juga merupakan salah satu element terpenting dalam sebuah kantor, kenyamanan kerja karyawan juga merupakan suatu hal yang dirasakan sangat perlu untuk diperhatikan oleh seorang pemilik perusahaan atau team pada kantor tersebut. Demi untuk Menjaga kebersihan kantor Anda, maka kami membuka Layanan Jasa Cuci Kursi kantor untuk Wilayah Jabodetabek, Jakarta, Bogor, Depok, dan Bekasi khususnya.

Anda Tidak perlu khawatir akan kesulitan menggunakan Jasa Cuci Kursi Kantor kami, yang perlu anda lakukan hanyalah dengan menelpon ke nomor Jasa Cuci Kursi Kantor yang kami sediakan untuk Anda. Setelah Menghubungi team Cuci Kursi Kantor kami, maka Team Kami akan segera mengunjungi kantor Anda untuk mencuci Kursi kantor yang ingin dibersihkan.memiliki tenaga handal plus dengan Alat Cuci Kursi Kantor terbaik yang ada di Jakarta., Jadi tidak perlu takut untuk memesan jasa cuci kursi kantor kami.

Jasa Cuci Kursi kantor kami menggunakan Alat modern yang menggunakan beberapa kemajuan tingkat teknologi terkini dalam Usaha Laundry Sofa dan Cuci Kursi kantor, Selain itu kami juga menggunakan Deterjen yang terbuat dari Bahan BioTechnology yang dijamin aman dan membunuh bakteri-bakteri menempel pada kursi kantor Anda.

Jasa Cuci Kursi Kantor adalah sebuah service istimewa untuk perusahan anda, kami juga akan memberikan Harga Khusus yang Coorporate untuk anda yang ingin bekerja sama dalam waktu jangka panjang dengan perusahaan kami.Banyak sekali kelebihan Jasa Cuci Kursi kantor yang akan kami berikan untuk Perusahaan Anda, Pemesanan Jasa Cuci Kursi kantor dalam Partai besar akan kami berikan diskon khusus untuk setiap pemesanan.

Bekasi, Saco-Indonesia.com - Di Pasar Blok G Tanah Abang bukan hanya dijadikan tempat prostitusi. Pada Rabu (23/1/2014) malam, sekitar pukul 23.00, 15 penjudi dibekuk Tim Reserse Kriminal Polrestro Jakarta Pusat, di pasar tersebut.

Bekasi, Saco-Indonesia.com - Di Pasar Blok G Tanah Abang bukan hanya dijadikan tempat prostitusi. Pada Rabu (23/1/2014) malam, sekitar pukul 23.00, 15 penjudi dibekuk Tim Reserse Kriminal Polrestro Jakarta Pusat, di pasar tersebut.

Kasat Reskrim Polres Jakarta Pusat Ajun Komisaris Besar Tatan Dirsan Atmaja mengatakan, para penjudi itu memakai satu kios di lantai 1 Pasar Blok G Tanah Abang.

"Perjudian digelar di salah satu kios di lantai 1 Pasar Blok G Tanah Abang, tapi di dalamnya itu ada lima lapak untuk tempat bermain judi," kata Tatan.

Tatan menjelaskan, ada sekitar 25 anggota Reskrim Polres Jakarta Pusat yang menggerebek arena judi yang berukuran 1,5x2 meter persegi itu.

"Jenis permainan domino yang digelar. Untuk besaran taruhan bervariasi, mulai dari Rp 20.000 hingga Rp 200.000 sekali pasang. Omzet perjudiannya itu bisa mencapai belasan juta rupiah," ujar Tatan lagi.

Dari tangan 15 penjudi itu, petugas menyita barang bukti berupa tiga kartu domino serta meja kecil dijadikan tempat bermain kartu, serta uang pecahan Rp 20.000 hingga Rp 50.000 sebanyak Rp 676.000.

Menanggapi kejadian ini, Direktur PD Pasar Jaya Djangga Lubis mengatakan, para pemain judi yang ditangkap di pihak kepolisian bukan di Pasar Blok G, melainkan di luar sekitar pasar.

"Penangkapan kemarin itu bukan di pasarnya, melainkan di bagian luar. Kalau di kios-kios Pasar Blok G memang banyak yang main domino, tapi tidak memakai uang. Hal itu pula sudah kita laporkan ke atasan," kata Djangga.

Meski begitu, ke depannya, Djangga akan memperketat penjagaan dan pengawasan Pasar Blok G dari aksi perjudian dan maraknya PSK. Saat ini, dia akan melakukan pengawasan selama jam buka dan tutup Pasar Blok G.

Petugas keamanan yang disewa untuk menjaga Pasar Blok G Tanah Abang merupakan pihak outsourcing. "Sekarang kita senang ada penertiban ini. Sekarang kita akan awasi. Kita tadinya mau memberlakukan jam buka-tutup, tapi terkendala pada pedagang sayuran di sana," ujarnya.

Sumber : Kompas.com

Editor : Maulana Lee

Satreskrim Polres Cimahi terus akan mendalami Dedeh Uum Fatimah yang berusia (38) tahun ibu tersangka pembunuh anaknya, Aisah Fany yang berusia (2,5) tahun yang ditenggelamkan ke dalam toren atau penampungan air. Termasuk dugaan aliran sesat dalam diri Dedeh.

Satreskrim Polres Cimahi terus akan mendalami Dedeh Uum Fatimah yang berusia (38) tahun ibu tersangka pembunuh anaknya, Aisah Fany yang berusia (2,5) tahun yang ditenggelamkan ke dalam toren atau penampungan air. Termasuk dugaan aliran sesat dalam diri Dedeh.

Pasalnya ibu tiga anak ini sama sekali tidak menyesali perbuatannya. Dedeh justru menyesal tidak menghabisi dua anak lainnya dalam insiden tersebut.

"Belum kita temukan, kita masih dalami kita juga geledah rumahnya tapi belum bisa kita simpulkan," kata Kapolres Cimahi AKBP Erwin Kurniawan , Jumat (14/3).

Dedeh saat ini masih terus dalam pemeriksaan intensif penyidik Polres Cimahi. Tes kejiwaan juga sudah dilakukan untuk dapat memastikan apakah terganggu atau tidak.

"Sudah hari Rabu kemarin di tes kejiwaan, hasilnya paling satu minggu baru keluar, jadi belum bisa kami simpulkan," paparnya.

Diberitakan sebelumnya, Dedeh ini dengan sadis tiba-tiba menenggelamkan anaknya sendiri yang masih balita ke dalam toren air di rumahnya di Kampung Cijengjing, Desa Kertamulya, Kecamatan Padalarang, Kabupaten Bandung Barat pada Selasa (11/3) lalu. Pelaku nekat menghabisi nyawa anaknya saat tidur pulas. Dedeh membunuh anaknya sendiri karena ingin mengirimnya ke surga.

y NEIL GENZLINGER

Frontline

Frontline An installment of this PBS program looks at the effects of Ebola on Liberia and other countries, as well as the origins of the outbreak.

The program traces the outbreak to its origin, thought to be a tree full of bats in Guinea.

By VINDU GOEL and QUENTIN HARDY

Mr. Goldberg was a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur and venture capitalist who was married to Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook.

Dave Goldberg Was Lifelong Women’s Advocate

Ms. von Furstenberg made her debut in the movies and on the Broadway stage in the early 1950s as a teenager and later reinvented herself as a television actress, writer and philanthropist.

David Goldman/Associated Press

National Guard soldiers boarding a truck in Baltimore on Sunday.

Baltimore residents prepared to resume the more familiar rhythms of their lives as days passed without new bouts of widespread rioting and as the National Guard began to pull its troops from the city.

Imagine an elite professional services firm with a high-performing, workaholic culture. Everyone is expected to turn on a dime to serve a client, travel at a moment’s notice, and be available pretty much every evening and weekend. It can make for a grueling work life, but at the highest levels of accounting, law, investment banking and consulting firms, it is just the way things are.

Except for one dirty little secret: Some of the people ostensibly turning in those 80- or 90-hour workweeks, particularly men, may just be faking it.

Many of them were, at least, at one elite consulting firm studied by Erin Reid, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. It’s impossible to know if what she learned at that unidentified consulting firm applies across the world of work more broadly. But her research, published in the academic journal Organization Science, offers a way to understand how the professional world differs between men and women, and some of the ways a hard-charging culture that emphasizes long hours above all can make some companies worse off.

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Ms. Reid interviewed more than 100 people in the American offices of a global consulting firm and had access to performance reviews and internal human resources documents. At the firm there was a strong culture around long hours and responding to clients promptly.

“When the client needs me to be somewhere, I just have to be there,” said one of the consultants Ms. Reid interviewed. “And if you can’t be there, it’s probably because you’ve got another client meeting at the same time. You know it’s tough to say I can’t be there because my son had a Cub Scout meeting.”

Some people fully embraced this culture and put in the long hours, and they tended to be top performers. Others openly pushed back against it, insisting upon lighter and more flexible work hours, or less travel; they were punished in their performance reviews.

The third group is most interesting. Some 31 percent of the men and 11 percent of the women whose records Ms. Reid examined managed to achieve the benefits of a more moderate work schedule without explicitly asking for it.

They made an effort to line up clients who were local, reducing the need for travel. When they skipped work to spend time with their children or spouse, they didn’t call attention to it. One team on which several members had small children agreed among themselves to cover for one another so that everyone could have more flexible hours.

A male junior manager described working to have repeat consulting engagements with a company near enough to his home that he could take care of it with day trips. “I try to head out by 5, get home at 5:30, have dinner, play with my daughter,” he said, adding that he generally kept weekend work down to two hours of catching up on email.

Despite the limited hours, he said: “I know what clients are expecting. So I deliver above that.” He received a high performance review and a promotion.

What is fascinating about the firm Ms. Reid studied is that these people, who in her terminology were “passing” as workaholics, received performance reviews that were as strong as their hyper-ambitious colleagues. For people who were good at faking it, there was no real damage done by their lighter workloads.

It calls to mind the episode of “Seinfeld” in which George Costanza leaves his car in the parking lot at Yankee Stadium, where he works, and gets a promotion because his boss sees the car and thinks he is getting to work earlier and staying later than anyone else. (The strategy goes awry for him, and is not recommended for any aspiring partners in a consulting firm.)

A second finding is that women, particularly those with young children, were much more likely to request greater flexibility through more formal means, such as returning from maternity leave with an explicitly reduced schedule. Men who requested a paternity leave seemed to be punished come review time, and so may have felt more need to take time to spend with their families through those unofficial methods.

The result of this is easy to see: Those specifically requesting a lighter workload, who were disproportionately women, suffered in their performance reviews; those who took a lighter workload more discreetly didn’t suffer. The maxim of “ask forgiveness, not permission” seemed to apply.

It would be dangerous to extrapolate too much from a study at one firm, but Ms. Reid said in an interview that since publishing a summary of her research in Harvard Business Review she has heard from people in a variety of industries describing the same dynamic.

High-octane professional service firms are that way for a reason, and no one would doubt that insane hours and lots of travel can be necessary if you’re a lawyer on the verge of a big trial, an accountant right before tax day or an investment banker advising on a huge merger.

But the fact that the consultants who quietly lightened their workload did just as well in their performance reviews as those who were truly working 80 or more hours a week suggests that in normal times, heavy workloads may be more about signaling devotion to a firm than really being more productive. The person working 80 hours isn’t necessarily serving clients any better than the person working 50.

In other words, maybe the real problem isn’t men faking greater devotion to their jobs. Maybe it’s that too many companies reward the wrong things, favoring the illusion of extraordinary effort over actual productivity.

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.”

The bottle Mr. Sokolin famously broke was a 1787 Château Margaux, which was said to have belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Mr. Sokolin had been hoping to sell it for $519,750.