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 The shorter pieces here - stories, essays and the extracts many previously unpublished, demonstrate the range of Trocchi's writing, his preoccupation with human isolation, with the outsider figure and his role as a 'cosmonaut of inner space'.