Alexander Trocchi

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

Thongs, by "Carmenicita de Las Lunas" (Trocchi), is among the author's most vibrant and respected works. The book gives us Gertrude Gault, the Grand Painmistress, and follows her career from the ghettos of Glasgow to her rebirth as Carmenicita de Las Lunas, greatest of all painmasters, before finally ending in a conclusion, staggering in its originality, imagination, and explicitness. Additional kudos to Trocchi for his ability to remain on topic throughout an entire work.

Thongs

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.

Cain's Books

Молодий Адам

Helen and Desire, the best known and finest of Trocchi'serotic novels, is a highly compelling examination of sexuality. Writtenfrom the perspective of its eponymous heroine, Helen Smith, it followsthe fortunes of this lady as she uses her alluring charms to take herthrough life. Inevitably she is also abused along the way by the menwho cannot resist the appeal of sex incarnate and so Helen's existencefluctuates from one of liberation to one of imprisonment. Beginning as an adolescent loner in an Australian village, thefree-thinking Helen, bored by the repressed and restrictive communitythat she was brought up in, escapes from this small-minded parochialismand begins her travels. The action moves from Australia to Singapore toIndia to France and finally to Algeria, from where, held captive as acaptive prisoner in her Arab tent, she is writing this book. What allows Helen and Desire to transcend the genre oferotic fiction is the way in which Trocchi parodies traditional eroticalinguistically. He also uses the book as a vehicle for examiningexistentialism, power and desire. Originally published under the pseudonym of Frances Lengel, Helen and Desirehas long been out of print in Britain. This new edition, with itsspecially commissioned introduction by Edwin Morgan, returns Trocchi'sunderground classic to the shelves of Britain's bookstores. About time,too.

Helen and Desire

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'.

A Trocchi Reader

Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds

Valentine Penrose

From adolescence Erzsebet Bathory indulged in sadistic lesbian fantasies, where only the spilling of a woman's blood would satisfy her urges. By middle-age, she had regressed to a mirror-fixated state of pathological necro-sadism involving witchcraft, torture, blood-drinking, cannibalism and, inevitably, wholesale slaughter.

Atrocities of Erzsebet Bathory

The Bloody Countess

Magnificent Sequel to Helen & Desire

The Carnal Days of Helen Seferis

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.

Young Adam

Descended from one of the most ancient aristocratic families of Europe, Erzsebet Bathory bore the psychotic aberrations of centuries of intermarriage. From adolescence she indulged in sadistic lesbian fantasies, where only the spilling of a woman's blood could satisfy her urges. By middle age, she had regressed to a mirror-fixated state of pathological necro-sadism involving witchcraft, torture, blood-drinking, cannibalism and, inevitably, wholesale slaughter. These years, at the end of the 16th century, witnessed a reign of cruelty unsurpassed in the annals of mass murder, with the Countess' depredations on the virgin girls of the Carpathians leading to some 650 deaths. Her many castles were equipped with chambers where she would hideously torture and mutilate her victims, becoming a murder factory where hundreds of girls were killed and processed for the ultimate, youth-giving ritual: the bath of blood. The Bloody Countess is Valentine Penrose's true, disturbing case history of a female psychopath, a chillingly lyrical account beautifully translated by Alexander Trocchi (author of Cain's Book), which has an unequalled power to evoke the decadent melancholy of doomed, delinquent aristocracy in a dark age of superstition"

Jan Cremer

R. E. WYNGAARD

I, Jan Cremer. English Version by R.E. Wyngaard and Alexander Trocchi

I, Jan Cremer. English version by R. E. Wyngaard and Alexander Trocchi

In one novel and four short stories, the author explores the tangled lives of men and women who live without roots or morals in a world where anything is acceptable.

The Outsiders

El Libro de Caín

A compelling existential thriller by the Beat-era writer: “Everyone should read Young Adam” (The Times Literary Supplement). Young Adam tells the story of Joe, a drifter who works on a barge traveling the Clyde River between Glasgow and Edinburgh. As the novel opens, Joe finds the corpse of a young woman floating in the water. Was it an accident, a suicide, or murder? As the police investigate and arrest a suspect, it becomes clear that Joe knows far more than he’s telling. Originally published in 1954, Young Adam was made into a film starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton, and is now reissued with an introduction by PEN finalist and literary critic David L. Ulin. This is a psychologically suspenseful novel and an absorbing portrait of a haunted man, from an iconoclastic Beat writer praised by the New Yorker for “prose that is always clean and sharp and often ferociously alive with poetry” and called “the most brilliant man I ever met” by Allen Ginsberg. “Trocchi may be the greatest unknown writer in the world.” —The Bloomsbury Review

Alexander Trocchi

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