Lonely Boy Blues
Alan Kapelner
Interview by Seymour Krim
June 1, 2019
ISBN 9780578467863 / Paperback / 150 pages / $12.99

The 75th-anniversary edition of Alan Kapelner's proto-Beat novel, long out of print for more than fifty years. First published in the shadow years preceding the Beats, the novel anticipates the movement's restless energies and oppositional stance while retaining a voice distinctly its own. This edition includes a 1967 interview with Kapelner conducted by Seymour Krim and reproduces Art Sussman's cover art from the 1956 Lion Books paperback edition.

"An altogether remarkable novel: a tough and bitter story of city life told in the spirit, and largely in the rhythm, of the blues. ... Overpoweringly brilliant. Lonely Boy Blues is something different and something to remember."
— The Philadelphia Enquirer

"Syncopated prose, a novel of almost brutal realism."
— Miami Daily News-Record

"This is an unconventional, hard-hitting story."
— The Los Angeles Times

"One seldom encounters in recent novels such terse and photographic realism so successfully projected."
— Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Undeniably this is a tour de force."
— Hartford Courant

"From the very outset Alan Kapelner grips your attention, and that is due to the virtuosity of his writing."
— Saturday Review