South Street

A Novel

David Bradley

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781480438538
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African American Fiction
• Index: Literature

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.