Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds

by Alexander Trocchi

Alexander Trocchi was the leading British beat writer of the 1950s and 60s. He left behind a small body of 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 The shorter pieces here - stories, essays and the extracts many previously unpublished, demonstrate the range of Trocchi's writing, his preoccupation with human isolation, with the outsider figure and his role as a 'cosmonaut of inner space'.

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Alexander Trocchi was a Scottish novelist and editor. He lived in Paris in the early 1950s and edited the literary magazine Merlin, which published Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Christopher Logue and Pablo Neruda, among others. Although he was never published in Merlin, American writer Terry Southern (who lived in Paris from 1948-1952) became a close friend of both Trocchi and his colleague Richard Seaver, and the three later co-edited the anthology Writers In Revolt (1962).

His early novel Young Adam (1954) was adapted into a film starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton in 2003.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls]

Contains the influential titular essay, a slapdown of George Orwell, letters to Hugh McDiarmid, Burroughs, Beckett, and Terry Southern, and assorted short prose pieces. I sampled and I sniffed. Did not inhale.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Had this on the go for a while and kept coming back to it, after having it on my TBR shelf for a decade, at least. Beautiful descriptive prose in the early autobiographical essays/stories and submerged ideas brought to the fore that are easy to relate to, i.e. The Tapeworm. Genius.

Later on, essays such as Sigma: A Tactical Blueprint feel totally relevant now. Will be passing on to friends.