Reddit reviews Honor Thy Thug (Thug Series)

>Is there a place where I could find a large text written in AAVE?

It sounds like you're specifically asking for authored text, so I'm not going to suggest spoken corpora that linguists use. Others have mentioned Twitter (which I've used in past research), but there are some serious confounds if you're just trying to gather as much AAE text material as you can.

Another option is blogs. You'll find higher register (but AAE) stuff places like very smart brothas, and more basilectal AAE on blogs like this one. Keep in mind that for both, there's an element of performance of identity.

>Maybe asking for a book entirely in AAVE would be too much,

It's mad books written in AAE and you can get them on Amazon. Most of them won't be good from a literary perspective, but that's not the point. I'm thinking specifically of page turners similar to the bodice rippers you see in drug stores. I'm not sure where you live, but in NYC, Philly, and DC you can get 'em on the street in the right neighborhoods (there's usually guys with tables on the sidewalk in Harlem, for instance).

I'm partial to Beastmode, which, among other things, has racist white cops who think in AAE because the author of the (self-published) book seems to not know that white people generally (and racist ones especially) don't speak (or always understand) AAE. The book itself is awful, but both the speech and the narration of these pulp novels are in very vernacular AAE.

Just follow the links.

That said, what I recommended are not high literature. People have written using AAE (do you specifically want vernacular, and no other registers?) in the past, so for instance, you get a lot of AAE flavor in Toni Morrison's books, or Zora Neal Hurston's books, but what I just pointed you towards are self-published pulp fiction.

Obviously I shouldn't have to say this, but I'm sure you know generalizing about black people from these books would be like generalizing about white people from Rocky Mountain Romance. Beastmode, in particular, is a sort of anti-authority crack-is-a-CIA-conspiracy retaliatory fever dream. I will say that while I haven't (yet) read it, in my neighborhood Honor Thy Thug seems to be pretty popular.

EDIT: I'm intentionally steering you away from publications where it's a white imagining of black styles.

Here's one I found while having my first Walmart experience in south Miami: Honor Thy Thug by Wahida Clark

"Urban lit’s favorite ride or die couple, Trae and Tasha, are back as they fight to hold onto their volatile relationship which gets closer to exploding with each passing day. Their friends, Angel and Kaylin, are caught up in their own dra­ma which pits brother against brother in a final showdown. Faheem and his wife Jaz, face their worst nightmare which almost takes them totally out of the game. Meanwhile, Kyron, who brought Trae to the brink of murder and Tasha to the edge of insanity, is back and hell bent on revenge."

I didn't really know what to make of it. That or the fact you could buy guns at Walmart :/