South Street: A Novel

By: David Bradley

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Synopsis: A poet craving authenticity ventures into a gritty Philadelphia neighborhood in this novel by the award-winning author of The Chaneysville Incident. Philadelphia&’s South Street is a world of contradiction. The hardscrabble neighborhood is filled with prostitutes and gangsters; working stiffs mingle with winos at Lightnin&’ Ed&’s bar. But the streetwalkers are nearing retirement, the gangsters are unemployed, and a community is thriving in and around a place written off by officials and politicians as blighted. Black poet Adlai Stevenson Brown makes his way to South Street in search of authenticity in the form of a neighborhood to save. But the world of South Street—beyond its grit and danger—is more than the cultured young fish out of water ever expected . . . and a lot more than he can handle. PEN/Faulkner Award–winner David Bradley&’s marvelous debut novel is riotously funny and keenly insightful in equal measure. South Street is a magnificent evocation not only of a vanished time, but of an American archetype in Adlai—a man in search of someone to save, unaware that he himself may need saving.

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