Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories

YOUNG ADAM

Alexander Trocchi

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.
ALEXANDER TROCCHI was a controversial Scottish novelist of the beat generation. A heroin addict, he is best known for Young Adam which was made into a film in 2003 starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton. Virtually forgotten by the time of his death in 1984, the first signs of a Trocchi renaissance came in the early 1990s as a new generation of Scottish writers began publishing in magazines such as Rebel Inc. "With books like Trainspotting, and writers like Alan Warner," says Scottish poet Edwin Morgan, who taught Trocchi at Glasgow University at the end of the 1940s, "there is a revival of interest in the figure of the exile, the rebel, the drug-taker. Irvine Welsh in particular made a revival of Trocchi possible."
Available products
Book

Published by Oneworld Classics/ Alma Books

Book

Published by Oneworld Classics/ Alma Books

Comments

Alex Trocchi has the courage so essential to a writer. He writes about spirit, flesh, and death and the vision that comes through the flesh. he has been there and brought it back.

Everyone should read Young Adam.

The plotless beauty of his writing, and its fearless look at the emptiness of his own life, put 'the Scottish Beat' on a par with Kafka and Camus.

The Scottish George Best of the literary world.

The most brilliant man I've ever met.