The Crazy Green of Second Avenue
Erje Ayden
Foreword by Seymour Krim / Preface by Frank O'Hara
July 11, 2023
ISBN 9798218217327 / Paperback / 134 pages / $16.99

A new edition of Erje Ayden's 1965 underground cult classic novel.

A ferocious, street-level novel of New York in the 1950s, The Crazy Green of Second Avenue captures the raw immediacy of downtown life before it hardened into myth. Written with manic intensity and moral urgency, Erje Ayden's cult classic follows a young outsider moving through bars, rooms, friendships, breakdowns, and brief illuminations along Second Avenue—a landscape of poverty, desire, art, and psychic extremity.

"I recommend his book to you as something both hip and precious."
— Seymour Krim

"Through Ayden's eyes we see an 'Amerika' as odd as Kafka's, as funny, as absurdly sad."
— Frank O'Hara

"Ayden presents a brazen, bizarre, and, best of all, original picture of pathos."
— Tampa Bay Times, August 8, 1992

"A moving study of a lonely man who is forever flowing upstream. It is the nightmare of the human animal."
— The San Francisco Examiner, July 28, 1968