South Street is a brilliant, heartfelt portrait of Black urban life and a man grappling with the messy, uncontainable truths of life, love, and survival.

Philadelphia's South Street in the 1970s is a place of sharp contrasts. On one block, working stiffs swap stories with winos at Lightnin' Ed's bar; a few doors down, gangsters and sex workers navigate a world on the edge. The neighborhood hums with life, even as the old guard ages out, the disenfranchised find themselves out of work, and the city's officials write the whole place off as blighted. And yet, somehow, the community endures.

Into this world comes Adlai Stevenson Brown, a Black poet searching for authenticity and a neighborhood to save. But South Street refuses to be neatly defined. Its grit is real, its danger immediate, and its residents are far more complicated than Adlai-or anyone-could imagine. In trying to save the street, he may discover he's the one who needs saving.

With riotous humor, sharp insight, and a poet's ear for the life of a place, PEN/Faulkner Award-winner David Bradley's debut novel, first published in 1975, captures a vanished era and a city vibrating with beautiful contradictions.

David Bradley is a novelist and educator. His debut novel, South Street, was first published by Grossman in 1975, and his second novel, The Chaneysville Incident (HarperCollins, 1981) won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Bradley has taught creative writing at several institutions and was an associate professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon.

Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of the memoir Sink, longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. His prose and poetry have been published in The Paris Review, Harper's, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere.