South Street

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. ?