Sometimes, life plays little jokes. For Jeannette McDonald, growing up in a small town in West Virginia in the 1950s, life had three particular jokes in mind: naming her after a famous movie star, giving her a birthday just after Valentines Day, and letting her grow up on a street named Gladdena place as far from glad as Jeannette was from being a movie star. Growing up is supposed to be a time of wonder and joy. For the girl on Gladden Street, the wonder was in discovering that when life plays jokes, anything is possible if you keep a healthy attitude. Ms. McDonald relates that some of lifes harshest realities can lead to new awakenings and a better life. Peppered with a series of brief, episodic, coming-of-age vignettes that illustrate Ms. McDonalds life and much of the American landscape of the 1950s, The Girl from Gladden Street provides a reminder that some of our most valuable lessons come from events experienced during the most impressionable times of life.

An “impressive new volume” of 5 noir novels by the cult-favorite author who stands alongside Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett as a master of American crime writing (The New York Review of Books) Among the pantheon of American crime writers—those masters of noir whose powerful vernacular style and dark and subversive themes transformed American culture and writing—David Goodis was a unique figure. Now, The Library of America and editor Robert Polito team up to celebrate the full scope of Goodis’s signature style with this landmark volume collecting five great novels from the height of his career. Goodis (1917-1967) was a Philadelphia-born pulp expressionist who brought a jazzy style to his spare, passionate novels of mean streets and doomed protagonists: an innocent man railroaded for his wife's murder (Dark Passage); an artist whose life turns nightmarish because of a cache of stolen money (Nightfall); a dockworker seeking to comprehend his sister's brutal death (The Moon in the Gutter); a petty criminal derailed by irresistible passion (The Burglar); and a famous crooner scarred by violence and descending into dereliction (Street of No Return). Long a cult favorite, Goodis now takes his place alongside Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in the pantheon of classic American crime writers.

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