Annin Street press kit

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One line

Annin Street is a debut novel about a South Philadelphia girl raised inside her aunts’ front-room numbers bank, who grows up to count the money of Atlantic City’s first casinos — and who, at eighty-five, is writing it all down before the fog takes the near streets.

Fifty words

South Philadelphia, 1948. Nine-year-old Netta Marino learns the street’s first commandment from the two aunts who run the block’s numbers bank upstairs: the best work is the work no one can find. Three decades later, she enters Atlantic City’s casino count rooms. At eighty-five, she begins writing the ledger down.

The full description

She kept the neighborhood’s secrets in a curtain hem. Now the fog is coming for hers.

South Philadelphia, 1948. Nine-year-old Netta Marino arrives on Annin Street, a block of scrubbed marble steps where the barber next door sings Puccini through her bedroom wall and everyone’s small hopeful money rides three digits at a time, folded into the corner of a grocery order.

Upstairs live her aunts: two courteous women in black who run the block’s numbers bank with banker’s hours and perfect manners. Netta, the grocery girl whose pages are never wrong, becomes their runner, then their apprentice, and learns the street’s first commandment: the best work is the work no one can find.

Then one April afternoon a police wagon turns the corner, and her mother answers the door with a dust rag in her hand.

Three decades later, the same human appetite for luck has been remade in chandeliers. Casino gambling has come to Atlantic City, and Netta walks into a count room where she will spend twenty-three years weighing the pennies of her whole people, rising from the hard count to the credit desk — the one woman in the building who has seen an earlier version of this business before, run smaller and kinder, out of a front room by two old women in black.

Now she is eighty-five. The doctors have their words for what is coming; she has hers. Before the fog takes the near streets, she is writing the whole ledger down, one Tuesday envelope at a time — the raid, the silences, the honest weight of it all — and sewing everything she loves where no confiscation reaches.

A debut novel about memory as duty, the hidden economies of women, and a block that kept its people. For readers of The Good Left Undone, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

The story behind the book

Annin Street grew from the author’s mother’s real memories, gathered over many weekends at her kitchen table while she could still be asked.

Its afterword, A Note on the Stories, explains which stories came from her life and where the novel begins to invent. At the center of the book is a simple urgency: family stories disappear unless someone asks for them in time.

The book’s final line is:

Ask yours now.

Story ideas for editors and producers

Asking while asking was possible

A son records his mother’s stories at her kitchen table while memory is still within reach — and discovers what survives when facts begin to disappear. A story about family history, caregiving, inheritance, and the questions we postpone until there may no longer be time to ask them.

Potential fit: books and culture coverage, family-history media, caregiving outlets, memory and aging features, literary and personal-story podcasts.

The women who ran the numbers

Before lotteries and casinos became institutions, neighborhood numbers banks operated through kitchens, front rooms, grocery stores, and word of mouth. Annin Street places two women at the center of that hidden economy: courteous, meticulous, trusted, and almost invisible.

Potential fit: women’s history, Philadelphia history, Italian-American history, hidden-history features, historical-fiction coverage.

From the front room to the count room

Netta grows up carrying slips for an illegal neighborhood numbers bank and later spends twenty-three years inside Atlantic City’s regulated casino industry. Her life spans two radically different systems built around the same enduring human impulse: the hope that a small wager might change everything.

Potential fit: Philadelphia and South Jersey media, Atlantic City history, casino-history programs, regional podcasts and documentary coverage.

The block as an archive

Rowhouses, marble steps, shared walls, corner stores, neighborhood rituals, and the people who knew one another’s business before anyone called it community. Annin Street uses one South Philadelphia block to ask what a neighborhood remembers after the people who made it are gone.

Potential fit: Philadelphia culture, architecture and neighborhood coverage, nostalgia, urban history, local-history podcasts.

Book facts

Title: Annin Street
Author: Jason Trama
Publisher: Party Wall Press
Publisher location: Cream Ridge, New Jersey
Publication date: October 6, 2026
Language: English
Genre: Fiction
Categories: Family saga · Coming of age · Italian-American fiction · Historical fiction

Editions

Paperback
ISBN: 979-8-9980088-5-6
Price: $17.99
Length: 278 pages
Trim: 5.5 × 8.5 in

Jacketed Hardcover
ISBN: 979-8-9980088-4-9
Price: $39.99
Length: 278 pages
Trim: 5.5 × 8.5 in

Large-Print Paperback
ISBN: 979-8-9980088-6-3
Price: $21.99
Length: 462 pages
Trim: 6 × 9 in
Type size: 16-point

eBook
ISBN: 979-8-9980088-2-5
Price: $5.99

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The Family by Naomi Krupitsky
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Author bio

Jason Trama lives in Cream Ridge, New Jersey. He wrote Annin Street, his first novel, from stories gathered at his mother’s kitchen table while asking was still possible.