Lonely Boy Blues - by Alan Kapelner (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published in 1944, Alan Kapelner's first novel, Lonely Boy Blues, is an intense (though not totally humorless) story of a dysfunctional family living in Brooklyn during World War 2. Written in a style that captures the rhythms of jazz and bebop, it is a precursor to the Beat novels of the 1950s.

Book Synopsis

Originally published in 1944, Alan Kapelner's first novel, Lonely Boy Blues, is an intense (though not totally humorless) story of a dysfunctional family living in Brooklyn during World War 2. Written in a style that captures the rhythms of jazz and bebop, it is a precursor to the Beat novels of the 1950s. This expanded 75th-anniversary edition includes Seymour Krim's 1967 interview with the author from his collection of essays, Shake It For The World, Smartass, and features Arthur Sussman's cover artwork from the 1956 paperback edition.

Legendary editor Maxwell Perkins, best known for his work on the first novels of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, wrote that Kapelner had "a most unusual talent in narrative, in dialogue, and in perception," and agreed to take on the editing of Lonely Boy Blues. It would be one of his last projects before his death in 1947.

Review Quotes

"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 of Literature