description: From the first startling encounter at Lightnin' Ed's Bar and Grill to the last glimpse of the ghetto from the other side of the river, this novel vibrates with a sense of life so strong, a sense of character so rich, that to read South Street is to be there: there among the lives and half-lives in the black city.David Bradley's excursion into street life resonates with jive talk and jazz rhythms, tastes of the visceral reality of this corner of America. A young, middle-class black, a would-be "proletarian poet," decides to seek the world of the "people"; and it is among the hookers and hustlers, the winos and the pimps, the conmen and the missionaries that he finds a life threatened by impotence and empty rage, yet charged and invigorated by laughter, brassiness. and pride.An extraordinary achievement, this rendering of life into words—words charged by the rhythms of the city, fired by the substance of lives lived on a precipitous edge.
language: English
title: South Street
titlecomplete: South Street
genres: Fiction
ratings_count: 45
publisher: Peter Smith Pub , Inc