The literate legitimate pimp.

Donnell Alexander writes the way Missy Elliott builds tracks. He changes speeds, moods and directions without warning, using wildly different voices, creating art that can be both invigorating and wearying to digest. His writing is, in a word, relentless.

Now living in L.A., Alexander's returning to Brooklyn to promote his new memoir, Ghetto Celebrity (Crown), with the Wet Daddy Literary Festival at the Brooklyn Lyceum on Sunday. Writers including Mat Johnson and Victor LaValle will read, and the festival's press materials promise some combination of "live bands, deejays, exotic dancers, film shorts, projections, light shows and numerous other surprises."

"The whole idea is to get something really crazy," Alexander says. "You get the rock-show crowd who are used to going out, they're fine, but they're kind of mannered. But you get the bookworms out, they're the nuts."

Anybody who remembers Alexander's stories about hiphop, sports or race in L.A. Weekly, ESPN The Magazine or Might probably thinks he's a hard but funny motherfucker who's turned some crazy-ass phrases. He's taken things even further with the confessional Ghetto Celebrity. The book burns like rubbing alcohol on an open wound as Alexander writes about the father he never really knew and also knew too well. He's candid in telling the story of a son coming to terms with his father's dubious legacy, a son trying to run away from something he can't outrun, something he may not even want to outrun.

Delbert Alexander was a charismatic showman, a ladies man with a flair for performing, whether he was channeling James Brown onstage or trying to score his next hit. He was a pimpin' junkie who beat his wife, a fella who shot somebody in the leg with a sawed-off shotgun in a squabble over $600. He was a spiritual man who asked to be incarcerated, so he could reflect, find the Lord again and figure himself out. But after he was released, he reverted back to street hustler. He was still looking for redemption in his 50s when he was a broken-down dude with a cane, working at a textile factory. Yet as his son Donnell tells it, even when Delbert worked at that mill, the man couldn't stop smiling, as if he proudly remembered everywhere he'd been.

Donnell Alexander, meanwhile, became a pretty high-profile journalist who ended up with an $80,000-a-year gig at ESPN The Magazine, where he wrote penetrating profiles of "troubled athletes" like Alonzo Spellman and Leonard Little. During his ascent from small-town Ohio boy to college-newspaper star to big-time glossy guy, he couldn't escape his father's shadow. Whether Alexander was using crack, befriending whores he never actually fucked or screwing around on his loving fiancee, he was developing his own ghetto celebrity. His writing gigs did not end well, and Alexander spares no blows as he reveals what went wrong.

"In terms of privacy, I do think dignity's really overrated," he says. "I think in our society as a whole, we need to come clean? 'This is why I am the way I am. This is why the world is the way it is. I'm culpable.' Hopefully, this will start a trend, and people will tell the fucking truth."

Ghetto Celebrity was originally to be published by McSweeney's Books.

"The truth is, if you ask Dave [Eggers] and if you ask me, it did get too big for McSweeney's," Alexander says.

There were legal issues, he adds, and much of the audience Alexander covets doesn't frequent independent bookstores. Now that his book is in Barnes & Noble, he knows the stakes are much higher.

"I wanted McSweeney's-level recognition back in the day, to have an independent book that sells really well," Alexander says. "If I sold 35,000 copies, I'd be happy. But now with Crown, it if sells 35,000 books, given what's been put into this, a lot of people are going to get fired."

So, yeah, after writing an entire book about how hard it's been to figure out the price and usefulness of fame and infamy, Alexander wants a little success and attention, if only so he can keep getting paid to write books. He's working on Barry Bonds' autobiography, and he says there's a great, surprising story there if Bonds agrees to reveal it, but Alexander also knows he'll probably have to hustle for more work after that project's done.

In Ghetto Celebrity, Alexander writes happily about his days on the nightclub beat in California. He was on every guest list, fine women were hitting on him and there was no shortage of free drugs. He says that kind of attention was all he wanted at the time. His book jacket says he still "parties like a champ," but he's also a dad with a seven-year-old, so priorities have changed.

I ask Alexander what he wants to do with whatever kind of fame he has now or may have in the future.

"All I ever wanted was for my life to be a little easier, to be able to chill out a little more," he says. "I wish there was Honda Accord, middlebrow celebrity. Maybe we're moving toward that. I really do think celebrity has its place. It can be harmful, but we're stuck with it. If you're going to make fuckers famous, give me a modicum of it."

Wet Daddy's Revenge of the Crooklyn Codgers, Sun., June 29 at Brooklyn Lyceum, 227 4th Ave. (Carroll St.), Park Slope, 866-469-2687.