This image is the cover for the book South Street

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. 

David Bradley

David Bradley is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon and the author of South Street and The Chaneysville Incident, the latter of which won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1982 and was a finalist for the National Book Award. The novel also earned Bradley an Academy Award for literature. Bradley has published essays, book reviews, and interviews in periodicals and newspapers including Esquire, Redbook, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the New Yorker.

Open Road Integrated Media