Outsiders

Comics & Graphic Novels

TROCCHI, Alexander

Publishers

Signet

Set on a canal linking Glasgow and Edinburgh, Young Adam was the first novel of one of the most important British post-war writers. 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. Tensions increase in cramped confines with the narrator's highly charged seduction of the skipper's wife. Compulsively readable, this is no ordinary thriller. Conventional morality is challenged. The certainty of events and their meaning is far from objective.

Young Adam (RIVERRUN WRITERS)

Literature & Fiction

British & Irish

Riverrun Pr

This is the journal of Joe Necchi, a junkie living on a barge that plies the rivers and bays of New York. Joe's world is the half-world of drugs and addicts -- the world of furtive fixes in sordid Harlem apartments, of police pursuits down deserted subway stations. Junk for Necchi, however, is a tool, freely chosen and fully justified; he is Cain, the malcontent, the profligate, the rebel who lives by no one's rules but his own. Like DeQuincey and Baudelaire before him, Trocchi's muse was drugs. But unlike his literary predecessors, in his roman a clef, Trocchi never romanticizes the source of his inspiration. If the experience of heroin, of the "fix," is central to Cain's Book, both its destructive force and the possibilities for creativity it creates are recognized and accepted without apology.Cain’s Book is the classic late-1950s account of heroin addiction. . . . An un-self-forgiving existentialism, rendered with writerly exactness and muscularity, set this novel apart from all others of the genre.”  William S. Burroughs

Cain's Book

Riverrun/Calder

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 ofCain'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.

The Holy Man and Other Stories

Genre Fiction

Calder Publications

Alexander Trocchi was the leading British beat writer of the 1950s and 60s. He left behind a small body of works: best known are the two novels, 'Young Adam' and 'Cain's Book': and a handful of erotic novels and translations. The shorter pieces here - stories, essays and the extracts many previously unpublished, demonstrate the range of Trocchi's writing, his preoccupation with human isolation, with the outsider figure and his role as a 'cosmonaut of inner space'.

Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds

Small Pr Distribution

Alexander Trocchi was one of the seminal beat figures. Born in Scotland, he made his way in Paris and New York, and Young Adam is one of his most important works. Joe is a drifter who works as a hired hand on a barge traveling the Clyde River between Glasgow and Edinburgh. As Young Adam opens, Joe finds the corpse of a young woman floating in the water. Was it an accident, a suicide, or was she murdered? As the police investigate and arrest a suspect, Trocchi’s haunting novel reveals that Joe knows far more than he’s telling. Meanwhile, confined in the claustrophobic space of the barge, an unspoken attraction develops between Joe and the wife of the barge skipper. Originally published in 1954, this is an absorbing existential thriller, a forgotten gem by an important beat writer.

Young Adam: A Novel

Literary

GROVE PRESS

This is the journal of Joe Necchi, a junkie living on a barge that plies the rivers and bays of New York. Joe’s world is the half-world of drugs and addictsthe world of furtive fixes in sordid Harlem apartments, of police pursuits down deserted subway stations. Junk for Necchi, however, is a tool, freely chosen and fully justified; he is Cain, the malcontent, the profligate, the rebel who lives by no one’s rules but his own. Like DeQuincey and Baudelaire before him, Trocchi’s muse was drugs. But unlike his literary predecessors, in his roman a clef, Trocchi never romanticizes the source of his inspiration. If the experience of heroin, of the fix,” is central to Cain’s Book, both its destructive force and the possibilities for creativity it creates are recognized and accepted without apology.

Contemporary

Joe is a drifter who works as a hired hand on a barge traveling the Clyde River between Glasgow and Edinburgh. As the story opens, he finds the corpse of a young woman drifting downstream. Was it an accident? Suicide? Murder? As the police investigate and arrest a suspect, it becomes apparent that Joe knew the dead woman and has more information than he's telling. Meanwhile, an unspoken attraction has developed between Joe and the wife of the barge skipper. Soon to be released as a film, this first novel by Scottish beat writer Alexander Trocchi is an absorbing existential thriller -- a lost gem of world literature reminiscent of Camus, Bukowski, and Burroughs. "Everyone should read Young Adam." -- The Times Literary Supplement "What Trocchi was about...was testing of boundaries, the eradication of acceptable behavior in the name of something more engaged." -- The Bloomsbury Review

Young Adam

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.

Helen And Desire (Rebel Inc. Classic)

CANONGATE BOOKS *

Originally published in 1957, this is an existentialist murder thriller set on a canal somewhere between Edinburgh and Glasgow. The corpse of a naked woman floats downstream and an innocent man is tried for the crime. Alexander Trocchi is the author of Cain's Book.

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Thrillers & Suspense

Rebel Pr

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by TROCCHI, Alexander. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by TROCCHI, Alexander

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by TROCCHI, Alexander. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Outsiders

Young Adam (RIVERRUN WRITERS)

Cain's Book

The Holy Man and Other Stories

Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds

Young Adam: A Novel

Cain's Book

Young Adam

Helen And Desire (Rebel Inc. Classic)

Young Adam