Dream Street

This collection of short stories, drawn from Runyon's late-1930s volumes, is set among Broadway gamblers, chorus girls, hoodlums, and night-club hangers-on in Prohibition-era and Depression New York. An unnamed narrator reports in a present-tense vernacular that mixes formal diction with slang. Plots turn on bets, courtship, loyalty, and sudden violence among people with names like the Lemon Drop Kid. The pieces are comic and sentimental at once: small-time operators try to stay ahead of luck, the law, and one another on the stretch of midtown the author called Dream Street. The book is a selection, not a single continuous novel.

Bound in pale orange cloth with a pattern in green, red and black by Alan Powers. Pale brown endleaves. Pale pink slipcase.