Search results for ""Author Alexander Trocchi""

Written in America while Trocchi was working on a scow on the Hudson River, Cain's Book is an extraordinary autobiographical account about a junky's life, and an honest, raunchy, eye-opening trip through hell. Probably the most famous novel about drug addiction and the hazards and excitements of an addict's life after Burrough's Naked Lunch, this modern classic - which was prosecuted in Britain for obscenity in 1965 - still shocks in its frankness and is relevant to this day.

Read more less

How difficult it is to explain! The terribly mute hunger in our bodies! If I touch my thigh here in the near darkness of the tent my whole body is again instinct with the driving urge that brought me here, and I cannot explain it. As always, it is stronger than fear. For me it has always been that way . . . When the irrepressible Helen runs away from the small town she grew up in, she discovers a world of excitement and experience beyond even her imagination, from Sydney to Singapore, Bombay, Monte Carlo and the Sahara desert. A subversive and deeply suggestive masterpiece, Helen and Desire is Trocchi's greatest erotic novel.

Read more less

Above a disused bar, in a dilapidated Parisian hotel that houses an assortment of indigent, marginalized lost souls, one of the inhabitants, a mysterious, reclusive holy man, is the subject of much speculation from some of his fellow occupants and respectful reverence from others. As the tale unfolds, the dynamics of this precarious microcosm are laid bare, in a powerful portrayal of those society has forgotten. Written when the author of Cain’s Book was at the height of his creative powers and enjoying an increasing reputation in avant-garde literary circles, ‘The Holy Man’ is here presented with ‘A Being of Distances’, ‘Peter Pierce’ and ‘A Meeting’, stories which similarly tackle themes of loneliness and disenfranchisement.

Read more less

Published for the first time in 1972, this verse collection reveals lesser-known facets of the novelist Alexander Trocchi’s writing. The poems included span a long period of time, and range from the lyricism of his early love poetry and reflections on his involvement in drug culture to the penetrating comments on contemporary figures and events of his later pieces. Trocchi’s language is strong, rich and frankly obscene, and his arguments are both witty and profound. Featuring an introduction by William S. Burroughs and a new preface by John Calder, Man at Leisure forms a notable addition to the published work of one of the finest Scottish writers of the twentieth century.

Read more less

Set on a canal linking Glasgow and Edinburgh, Young Adam is the masterly literary debut by one of the most important British post-war novelists. Trocchi’s narrator is an outsider, a drifter working for the skipper of a barge. Together they discover a young woman’s corpse floating in the canal, and tensions increase further in cramped confines with the narrator’s highly charged seduction of the skipper’s wife. Conventional morality and the objective meaning of events are stripped away in a work that proves compulsively readable.

Read more less