Books by Samuel Beckett

Book SynopsisFrom an inauspicious beginning at the tiny Left Bank Theatre de Babylone in 1953, followed by bewilderment among American and British audiences, "Waiting for Godot" has become one of the most important and enigmatic plays of the past fifty years and a cornerstone of twentieth-century drama. As Clive Barnes wrote, "Time catches up with genius. . . . "Waiting for Godot" is one of the masterpieces of the century." The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone--or something--named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree, inhabiting a drama spun of their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as mankind's inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett's language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existential post- World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of our time.

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Book SynopsisOriginally written in French and translated into English by Beckett, Endgame was given its first London performance at the Royal Court Theatre in 1957.HAMM: Clov!CLOV: Yes.HAMM: Nature has forgotten us.CLOV: There''s no more nature.HAMM: No more nature! You exaggerate.CLOV: In the vicinity.HAMM: But we breathe, we change! We lose our hair our teeth! Our bloom! Our ideals!CLOV: Then she hasn''t forgotten us.

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Book SynopsisThe present volume gathers all of Beckett''s texts for theatre, from 1955 to 1984. It includes both the major dramatic works and the short and more compressed texts for the stage and for radio.''He believes in the cadence, the comma, the bite of word on reality, whatever else he believes; and his devotion to them, he makes clear, is a sufficient focus for the reader''s attention. In the modern history of literature he is a unique moral figure, not a dreamer of rose-gardens but a cultivator of what will grow in the waste land, who can make us see the exhilarating design that thorns and yucca share with whatever will grow anywhere.'' - Hugh KennerContents: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, All That Fall, Acts Without Words, Krapp''s Last Tape, Roughs for the Theatre, Embers, Roughs for the Radio, Words and Music, Cascando, Play, Film, The Old Tune, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Breath, Not I, That Time, Footfalls, Ghost Trio,...but the clouds..., A Piece of Monologue, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, Quad, Catastrophe, Nacht und Traume, What Where.

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Book SynopsisEdited by J. C. C. Mays Murphy, Samuel Beckett''s first novel, was published in 1938. Its work-shy eponymous hero, adrift in London, realises that desire can never be satisfied and withdraws from life, in search of stupor. Murphy''s lovestruck fiancée Celia tries with tragic pathos to draw him back, but her attempts are doomed to failure. Murphy''s friends and familiars are simulacra of Murphy, fragmented and incomplete. But Beckett''s achievement lies in the brilliantly original language used to communicate this vision of isolation and misunderstanding. The combination of particularity and absurdity gives Murphy''s world its painful definition, but the sheer comic energy of Beckett''s prose releases characters and readers alike into exuberance.

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Book SynopsisKrapp''s Last Tape was first performed by Patrick Magee at the Royal Court Theatre in October 1958, and described as ''a solo, if that is the word, for one voice and two organs: one human, one mechanical. It fills few pages. It is perhaps the most original and important play of its length ever written.'' (Roy Walker)The present volume brings together Krapp''s Last Tape and Beckett''s other shorter works or ''dramaticules'' written for the stage. It will be complemented by a forthcoming Faber edition of dramatic works written for radio and screen. Arranged in chronological order of composition, these shorter plays exhibit the laconic means and compassionate ends of Beckett''s dramatic vision. KRAPP ''Here I end this reel. Box - [Pause.] - three, spool - [Pause.] - five. [Pause.] Perhaps my best years have gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn''t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I w

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Book SynopsisThe iconic trilogy of novels by the era-defining Nobel laureate, relaunched for a new generation. I can't go on, I'll go on. The Unnamable is a voice.

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Book SynopsisBut as Moran's physical and mental state deteriorate, his narrative starts to mirror Molloy's in mysterious ways. Molloy is the first of the three great novels Samuel Beckett produced during his 'frenzy of writing' in the late 1940s.

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Book SynopsisThe iconic trilogy of novels by the era-defining Nobel laureate, relaunched for a new generation. Nothing is more real than nothing. Malone, a decrepit old man, lies naked in his bed, scrawling bitter observations in an exercise book.

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Book SynopsisSubtitled â??A tragicomedy in two actsâ??, and famously described by the Irish critic Vivien Mercier as a play in which â??nothinghappens, twiceâ??, En attendant Godot was first performed at the Th_Ãtre de Babylone in Paris in 1953. It was translated into English by Samuel Beckett, and opened as Waiting for Godot at the Arts Theatre in London in 1955.â??I told [Ralph] Richardson that if by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot.This seemed to disappoint him greatly.â??-- Samuel Beckett to Barney Rosset, 18 October 1954All the dead voices.They make a noise like wings.Like leaves.Like sand.Like leaves.[Silence.]They all speak together. Each one to itself.[Silence.]Rather they whisper.They rustle.They murmur. They rustle.[Silence.] What do they say?They talk about their lives.To have lived is not enough for them.They have to talk about it.To be dead is not enough for them.It is not sufficient.[Silence.]They make a noise like feathers.Like leaves.Like ashes.Like leaves.

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Book SynopsisIt was as a poet that Samuel Beckett launched himself in the little reviews of 1930s Paris, and as a poet that he ended his career.The Collected Poems is the most complete edition of Beckett''s poetry and verse translations ever to be published, as well as the first critical edition. It establishes a significant new canon, and the commentary draws on a wide range of published sources, manuscripts and Beckett''s extensive correspondence. The notes place each poem in context, detailing the history and circumstances of its composition; they indicate significant variants and help explain obscure turns of phrase and allusions (frequently sourced to Beckett''s notebooks); they also identify resonances between poems and across Beckett''s work as a whole. The commentary is written in a lively and engaging style and is intended equally for the general reader, the student of modernism and the Beckett specialist.

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Book Synopsis''They didn''t seem to take much interest in my private parts which to tell the truth were nothing to write home about, I didn''t take much interest in them myself.''From the master of the absurd, these two stories of an unnamed vagrant contending with decay and death combine bleakness with the blackest of humour. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York''s underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

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Book SynopsisFaber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles.

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Book SynopsisHappy Days was written in 1960 and first produced in London at the Royal Court Theatre in November 1962.WINNIE: [ . . .] Well anyway - this man Shower - or Cooker - no matter - and the woman - hand in hand - in the other hands bags - kind of big brown grips - standing there gaping at me [...] - What''s she doing? he says - What''s the idea? he says - stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground - coarse fellow - What does it mean? he says - What''s it meant to mean? - and so on - lot more stuff like that - usual drivel - Do you hear me? He says - I do, she says, God help me - What do you mean, he says, God help you? (stops filing nails, raises head, gazes front.) And you, she says, what''s the idea of you, she says, what are you meant to mean?

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Book SynopsisThis is the last of three volumes of collected shorter prose to be published in the Faber edition of the works of Samuel Beckett - which already includes a volume of early stories (The Expelled/The Calmative/The End/First Love) and of late stories (Company/Ill Seen Ill Said/Worstward Ho/Stirrings Still). The present volume contains all of the short fictions - some of them no longer than a page - written and published by Beckett between 1950 and the early 1970s. Most were written in French, and they mostly belong within three loose sequences: Texts for Nothing, Fizzles and Residua. The edition also includes two remarkable independent narratives: From an Abandoned Work and As The Story Was Told. All of these texts, whose unsleeping subject is themselves, demonstrate that the short story is one of the recurrent modes of Beckett''s imagination, and occasions some of his greatest works. ... he would like it to be m

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Book SynopsisIt was as a poet that Samuel Beckett launched himself in the little reviews of 1930s Paris, and as a poet that he ended his career. This new selection, from Whoroscope (1930) to ''what is the word'' (1988), describes a lifetime''s arc of writing. It was as a poet moreover that Beckett made his first breakthrough into writing in French, and the Selected Poems represents work in both languages, including the sequence of brief but highly crafted mirlitonnades, which did so much to usher in the style of his late prose, and come as close as anything he wrote to honouring the ambition to ''bore one hole after another in language, until what lurks behind it - be it something or nothing - begins to seep through.'' Also included are several of Beckett''s translations from contemporaries - Apollinaire, Eluard, Michaux, Montale - in versions which count among his own poetic achievements. Edited by David Wheatley

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Book SynopsisThese four stories or ''nouvelles'' date from 1945, though all were published much later, in French and subsequently in English. All make use of a first-person narrator, and relish its vagaries - the inability to remember facts, the uncertainty as to why he is speaking in the first place, the loss of heart when explanations seem called for... Above all, the stories crisply plot the narrator''s plotless descent into vagrancy, the steeper as it approaches The End. Out of these short works and their patient procedures grew the large canvases of Molloy and Malone Dies.My bench was still there. It was shaped to fit the curves of the seated body. It stood beside a watering trough, gift of a Mrs Maxwell to the city horses, according to the inscription. During the short time I rested there, several horses took advantage of the monument. The iron shoes approached and the jingle of the harness. Then silence. That was the horse looking at me. Then the noi

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Book SynopsisWritten in Roussillon during World War Two, while Samuel Beckett was hiding from the Gestapo, Watt was first published in 1953. Beckett acknowledged that this comic novel unlike any other ''has its place in the series'' - those masterpieces running from Murphy to the Trilogy, Waiting for Godot and beyond. It shares their sense of a world in crisis, their profound awareness of the paradoxes of being, and their distrust of the rational universe. Watt tells the tale of Mr Knott''s servant and his attempts to get to know his master. Watt''s mistake is to derive the essence of his master from the accidentals of his being, and his painstakingly logical attempts to ''know'' ultimately consign him to the asylum. Itself a critique of error, Watt has previously appeared in editions that are littered with mistakes, both major and minor. The new Faber edition offers for the first time a corrected text based on a scholarly appraisal of the manusc

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Book SynopsisPublished in French in 1961, and in English in 1964, How It Is is a novel in three parts, written in short paragraphs, which tell (abruptly, cajolingly, bleakly) of a narrator lying in the dark, in the mud, repeating his life as he hears it uttered - or remembered - by another voice. Told from within, from the dark, the story is tirelessly and intimately explicit about the feelings that pervade his world, but fragmentary and vague about all else therein or beyond.Together with Molloy, How It Is counts for many readers as Beckett''s greatest accomplishment in the novel form. It is also his most challenging narrative, both stylistically and for the pessimism of its vision, which continues the themes of reduced circumstance, of another life before the present, and the self-appraising search for an essential self, which were inaugurated in the great prose narratives of his earlier trilogy. she sits aloof ten yards fifteen yards she looks up looks

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Book Synopsis''Echo''s Bones'' was intended by Samuel Beckett to form the ''recessional'' or end-piece of his early collection of interrelated stories, More Pricks Than Kicks, published in 1934. The story was written at the request of the publisher, but was held back from inclusion in the published volume. ''Echo''s Bones'' has remained unpublished to this day, and the present edition will situate the work in terms of its biographical context, its intertextual references, and as a vital link in the evolution of Beckett''s early work.The editor, Mark Nixon, is director of the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading.

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Book SynopsisSamuel Beckett directed Krapp''s Last Tape on four separate occasions: this volume offers a facsimile of his 1969 Schiller-Theater notebook.Professor Knowlson writes that in these notes ''we see Beckett simplifying, shaping and refining, as he works towards a realization of the play that will function well dramatically. The material reveals a flexibility and openness of approach often considered alien to Beckett''s ways of working in the theatre.'' The Schiller notebook also contains some of the most explicit analysis by Beckett of his own work ever revealed.The revised text incorporates many of the changes Beckett made in the 1969 Schiller production, as well as subsequent changes in later productions. Professor Knowlson worked closely with Beckett over these revisions and deviations from the original are noted and explained in detail.

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Book SynopsisThis new collection brings together First Love, The Calamative, The End and The Expelled; these four novellas are among the first major works of Beckett''s decision to use French as his language of literary composition. Rich in verbal and situational humour, they offer a fascinating insight into many of the issues which preoccupied Beckett all his working life. As the first novella reveals, nobody writes with quite such cruel and unnervingly clever wit as Beckett...

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Book SynopsisThs volume contains all of Beckett''s less-than-full-length works (or ''Dramaticules'') for the stage, radio and television. Arranged in chronological order of composition, these shorter plays demonstrate the laconic means and compassionate ends of Beckett''s dramatic vision.Contents: All That Fall, Act Without Words, Krapp''s Last Tape, Roughs for Theatre, Embers, Roughs for Radio, Words and Music, Cascando, Play, Film, The Old Tune (adapted from Pinget), Come and Go, Eh Joe, Breath, Not I, That Time, Footfalls, Ghost Trio, ...but the clouds..., A Piece of Monologue, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, Quad, Catastrophe, Nacht und Traume, What Where.

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Book SynopsisBeckett's first literary landmark' (St Petersburg Times) is a wonderfully savoury introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning author. Written in 1932, when the twenty-six-year-old Beckett was struggling to make ends meet, the novel offers a rare and revealing portrait of the artist as a young man. When submitted to several publishers, all of them found it too literary, too scandalous or too risky; it was only published posthumously in 1992. As the story begins, Belacqua a young version of Molloy, whose love is divided between two women, Smeraldina-Rima and the little Alba wrestles with his lusts and learning across vocabularies and continents, before a final relapse into Dublin' (New Yorker). Youthfully exuberant and Joycean in tone, Dream is a work of extraordinary virtuosity.

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Book SynopsisWritten over three months in 1946, Mercier and Camier was Beckett''s first post-war work, and his first novel in French. He came to regard it as a practice piece, and set it aside to write his trilogy. Mercier et Camier was finally published in 1970, and in Beckett''s English translation four years later. The eponymous heroes tramp around a city, then out of it, then back again. They are aimless, but there is something elusive that they should be doing. They arrange meetings, they drink, they argue, they discuss being shot of each other. They are preoccupied by the weather, by provisions, by a raincoat, by an umbrella, by a bicycle . . .''All of these ingredients in the later work are accompanied here, fleetingly, by those things in Beckett that we know but cannot really name, those things that occupy so much of the trilogy. Intangible things, traps in the mind, that voice we hear, the stop-start understanding, the ongoing bewilderment, the fear.'' Keit

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Book SynopsisHis first published work of fiction (1934), More Pricks Than Kicks is a set of ten interlocked stories, set in Dublin and involving their adrift hero Belacqua in a series of encounters, as woman after woman comes crashing through his solipsism. More Pricks contains in embryo the centrifugal world of Beckett''s men and women. She lifted the lobster clear of the table. It had about thirty seconds to live. Well, thought Belacqua, it''s a quick death, God help us all. It is not.

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Book SynopsisThis volume completes the publication of this series of notebooks, the plays in question being Play, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Footfalls, That Time and What Where.

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Book SynopsisWaiting for Godot has become one of the most important and enigmatic plays of the past 50 years and a cornerstone of 20th-century drama. The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone--or something--named Godot. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as mankind''s inexhaustible search for meaning.

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Book SynopsisThis new edition brings together all of Beckett''s dramatic writings for radio, television and film, offering works which range from eloquent comic naturalism to an eviscerated and pared-down symbolism. Above all, Beckett found his unique uses for the radio-play, a medium ''for voices not bodies'', compacted of speech, sound and silence - and the plays in this volume intently explore the resources and limits of the sound-stage.My father, back from the dead, to be with me. (Pause.) As if he hadn''t died. (Pause.) No, simply back from the dead, to be with me, in this strange place. (Pause.) Can he hear me? (Pause.) Yes, he must hear me. (Pause.) To answer me? (Pause.) No, he doesn''t answer me. (Pause.) Just be with me. (Pause.) That sound you hear is the sea. (Pause. Louder.) I say that sound you hear is the sea, we are sitting on the strand. (Pause.) I mention it because the sound is so strange, so unlike the sound of the sea, that if you didn''t see what it was you would

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Book SynopsisWritten in French in the late forties before Waiting for Godot, Eleutheria is about a young man at odds with his middle-class family, living alone in a bedsit and refusing to take part in ''normal'' life while accepting handouts from his mother. Often richly comic, it contains elements of high farce and draws on the traditions of French boulevard comedy and melodrama.This new edition includes the notice by Jérôme Lindon, in its original French, which accompanied the first edition in 1995, explaining the circumstances under which the play was first published.

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