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. Tensions increase in cramped confines with the narrator's highly charged seduction of the skipper's wife. Compulsively readable, this is no ordinary thriller. It challenges conventional morality. The certainty of events and their meaning is far from objective.

First published in 1972, this verse collection ranges over multiple years and includes the lyricism of early love poetry along with reflections on drug culture and penetrating comments on contemporary figures and events. The poems' language is strong, rich, and frankly obscene, while the arguments range from the witty to the profound.

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 Naked Lunch , this modern classic - which was prosecuted in Britain for obscenity in 1965 - still shocks in its frankness and is sadly relevant to this day.

Alexander Trocchi fue uno de los escritores más notables de las décadas de los 50 y 60, una figura destacada en la vanguardia europea y una especie de figura de culto desde su prematura muerte en 1984. Nacido en Glasgow en 1925, se trasladó a París en 1952 donde frecuento los ámbitos del existencialismo y fue un asiduo de los ambientes nocturnos del barrio latino. Para poder subsistir, se dedicó a escribir novelas de corte pornográfico que firmaba con seudónimo, y a la edición de la famosa revista Merlin, de la que se editaron siete números y donde colaboraron, entre otros, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Paul Eluard, Jean-Paul Sartre y Henry Miller.