The BURIED Book Club discussion

Alan Kapelner had two novels published during his lifetime: Lonely Boy Blues (1944) and All the Naked Heroes (1960).

Of the second book, Maxwell Geismar wrote in the New York Herald Tribune:

"A novel of the 30s, acrid, angry, desperate—sometimes sentimental—but also full of a folk humor and folk wisdom that we have not had in our literature for quite a while. It is a kind of prose-poem of the decade more than a strict novel: a panorama of the period in the bitter brilliant tone of the early Dos Passos. It casts a hard and scornful light on the social criticism of such recent writers as Norman Mailer, and it makes the beatniks look like the disturbed and mystic children that they are. Perhaps the only real comparison with Mr. Kapelner’s chronicle, and the only recent rival it has had, is Nelson Algren’s A Walk on the Wild Side. . . . This novel indeed, coming so late in time as it does, forms a curious link between the 'art novels' of the 20s and the 'beat novels' of the 50s."

Read more on Kapelner here:

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/remaind...

I'm crowdfunding a 75th-anniversary expanded edition of Alan Kapelner's debut novel, Lonely Boy Blues.

In an article about neglected books on The New York Society Library website, Steven McGuirl wrote that Lonely Boy Blues "chronicles a few months in the shattered lives of a Brooklyn family during WWII. It harkens back to proletarian realism of decades past while utilizing the innovations of modernism and a hip, jazz-inflected style that anticipates the Beat writers of the 1950s." The Pulp International website described the novel as "a precursor to Kerouac and the like—verbally experimental, trying to capture with its prose the rhythm of jazz and bop," and labeled its style as "proto-Beat."

Read the first chapter here: http://www.toughpoets.com/kapelner/ka...

This 75th-anniversary edition of Lonely Boy Blues includes literary critic Seymour Krim's 1967 interview with the author, "I Talk with Alan Kapelner," from his 1970 collection of essays, Shake It for the World, Smartass.

Here's a link to the Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...