Young Adam - Softcover

Trocchi, Alexander

3.74

1,157 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802139779 ISBN 13: 9780802139771

Publisher: Grove Press, 2003

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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

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About the Author:

Alexander Trocchi (1925 1984) was a Scottish novelist whose numerous works include Cain’s Book. He resided mainly in Paris and New York throughout his life. He was an editor of the literary journal Merlin, which published works by Eug�ne Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others.

David L. Ulin is the author, most recently, of the novel Ear to the Ground. His other books include Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he spent ten years as book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times.

Review:

Praise for Alexander Trocchi and Young Adam:

Trocchi may be the greatest unknown writer in the world . . . What Trocchi was about, in life and art, was the testing of boundaries, the eradication of acceptable behavior in the name of something more engaged.” Bloomsbury Review

Everyone should read Young Adam.” Times Literary Supplement

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.” William S. Burroughs

The most brilliant man I’ve ever met.” Allen Ginsberg

Mr. Trocchi’s ideas (or, rather, his gropings toward the distant glow of ideas) are set down in prose that is always clean and sharp and often ferociously alive with poetry.” New Yorker

[Young Adam] is rife with desire and longing, a sense that, in the physical, we might free ourselves, however temporarily, from the strictures of society. More than anything, though, it’s a philosophical novel, a tautly written existential thriller.” David L. Ulin, LA Weekly

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