In the nineteenth century the serialized works of literary giants like Dickens and Dostoevsky were first read in pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers by readers who waited for each installment with bated breath. Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, which detailed the gay and drug cultures of the hedonistic 1970's in the San Francisco Chronicle, and Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, which ran in Rolling Stone, are more recent examples of the serialized novel. Recently New York Newsday has added a marketing twist -- a sixty-fourpart fictional series aimed at New York's growing Latino community. "We want to reach out to them and sell newspapers," says New York Newsday editor in chief Don Forst. Stanley Mieses, who edited the resulting series, "Streets of Fire," said he envisioned a daily narrative that would focus on the lives of recent immigrants, who are often ignored by the mainstream media.

Soledad Santiago, an activist, writer, and mother who had lived in both Puerto Rican and Anglo communities in the U.S., was selected to write the series. A German-born Swiss-Turk who immigrated to the U.S. at the age of twelve -- when her name was Sabire Vural -- Santiago says her writing closely reflects her own life and those of her two grown children. After a divorce from a drug-addicted husband who later died of AIDS, she says, she faced single parenthood, homelessness, and welfare. Years later, she became the deputy press secretary of New York state attorney general Robert Abrams, and the head of the New York City press office for state comptroller Edward Regan.

"I saw the system from the underbelly, then saw it on the inside," she says. Her characters tend to reflect her experiences. After the first installment appeared in Newsday's Part 2 feature section last March, Santiago worked under tight, continuous deadlines, and often incorporated aspects of the day's breaking news into her 900-word-a-day account of the life of a Puerto Rican police detective and single mother named Francesca Colon. "It was an opportunity for the characters to have little discussions about the big issues all New Yorkers face," she says.

"Streets of Fire" was advertised widely in New York City's Spanish media, as well as the African-American oriented Amsterdam News and the Carib News, a publication tailored to the West Indian community.

The serial took up substantial space over several months, making it an unusual and potentially costly gamble for a city daily engaged in New York's four-way newspaper war.

Although there are no hard figures on the number of readers drawn in by the series, the volume of calls it generated forced Newsday to set up a telephone line where callers could hear a recap of previous story developments, read aloud by the author herself. Even after the series ended, on June 12, the calls kept coming. Newsday editors consider this experiment so successful that they are considering another serial.

"Streets of Fire" was certainly a success for Santiago, who had previously published three novels. For one thing, she sold the book to Signet Books. But Santiago was sorry that the serial was targeted to the Latino community, an approach she says she had not been aware of when she signed on.

"It is important that people of all types be authentically reflected in media, but it is important too to show that we are all not that different, that we have common links," Santiago says. "It is a classic American mistake, especially when we are breaking down into such tribalistic factions. I think it's wrong to segment the appeal of a story to one particular ethnic or religious group. A work that comes from the heart really appeals to us all."

Despite the targeting of the Latino community, Santiago and her New York Newsday editors say that response to "Streets of Fire" seemed to cross racial and ethnic lines -- but not gender lines. The fact that most readers were women is considered a plus at the paper, since women are the demographic group that newspapers have been losing in the largest numbers.

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