Search results for ""Author Samuel Beckett""

'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 'Echo's Bones' has remained unpublished to this day, and the present edition will situate the work in terms of its biographical context, its intertextual references, and as a vital link in the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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Written 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.' Keith Ridgeway George, said Camier, five sandwiches, four wrapped and one on the side. You see, he said, turning graciously to Mr Conaire, I think of everything. For the one I eat here will give me the strength to get back with the four others. Sophistry, said Mr Conaire. You set off with your five, wrapped, feel faint, open up, take one out, eat, recuperate, push on with the others. For all response, Camier began to eat. You'll spoil him, said Mr Conaire. Yesterday cakes, today sandwiches, tomorrow crusts and Thursday stones. Mustard, said Camier.

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It 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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The Unnamable - so named because he knows not who he may be - is from a nameless place. He speaks of previous selves ('all these Murphys, Molloys, and Malones...') as diversions from the need to stop speaking altogether. But, as with the other novels in the trilogy, the prose is full of marvellous precisions, full of its own reasons for keeping going. ...perhaps the words have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

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This 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 my fault that words fail him, of course words fail him. He tells his story every five minuts, saying it is not his, there's cleverness for you. He would like ti to be my fault that he has no story, of course he has no story, that's no reason for trying to foist one on me...

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Originally 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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Written in French and first performed at the Théâtre du Bablyone in Paris, in 1953, En attendant Godot was subsequently translated by Samuel Beckett into English as Waiting for Godot. It was performed at the Arts Theatre in London in 1955, and first published by Faber in 1956.To mark the centenary of Beckett's birth and the fiftieth anniversary of its original publication, Faber are now publishing for the first time a bilingual edition of this great masterpiece. Subtitled 'a tragicomedy in two acts', and once famously described by the Irish critic Vivian Mercier as a play in which 'nothing happens, twice'. Waiting for Godot is also a play that was written twice. Here, on facing pages, the reader can watch it unfold simultaneously in two languages.

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This 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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Samuel 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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This 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. Professor Gontarski brings his own experience as a director to editing this book, which provides a continuing revelation of the playwright's approach to the staging of his work. To these 'shorter plays' Samuel Beckett devoted the same care and attention to the details of textual revision and stagecraft as he did to the full-length works, and this book contains revised texts prepared on the same editorial basis as before.

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Edited by Paul Auster, this four–volume set of Beckett's canon has been designed by award-winner Laura Lindgren. Available individually, as well as in a boxed set, the four hardcover volumes have been specially bound with covers featuring images central to Beckett's works. Typographical errors that remained uncorrected in the various prior editions have now been corrected in consultation with Beckett scholars C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski. Beckett was interested in consciousness as a form of comedy close to tragedy and logic as a crime. He loved the tension in 'cogito ergo sum' and took a dim view of the connecting word, the 'ergo' in the equation. Cogitating was the nightmare from which his characters were trying to awake. Being was a sour trick played on them by some force with whom they were trying desperately not to reckon. Beckett produced infinite amounts of comedy about the business of thinking as boring, invalid, and quite unnecessary. His characters did not need to think in order to be, or be in order to think. They knew they existed because of the odd habits and deep discomforts of their bodies. I itch therefore I am." — Colm Toibin, from his Introduction

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Edited by Paul Auster, this four–volume set of Beckett's canon has been designed by award-winner Laura Lindgren. Available individually, as well as in a boxed set, the four hardcover volumes have been specially bound with covers featuring images central to Beckett's works. Typographical errors that remained uncorrected in the various prior editions have now been corrected in consultation with Beckett scholars C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski. "A man speaking English beautifully chooses to speak in French, which he speaks with greater difficulty, so that he is obliged to choose his words carefully, forced to give up fluency and to find the hard words that come with difficulty, and then after all that finding he puts it all back into English, a new English containing all the difficulty of the French, of the coining of thought in a second language, a new English with the power to change English forever. This is Samuel Beckett. This is his great work. It is the thing that speaks. Surrender." — Salman Rushdie, from his Introduction

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A The Times & Sunday Times Literary Nonfiction Book of the Year'Fascinating... Wonderfully entertaining and absorbing' Sunday Times'Gripping... A story well told.' New York Times Book ReviewFinalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography 2020In 1971 Deirdre Bair was a journalist with a recently acquired PhD who managed to secure access to Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. He agreed that she could write his biography despite never having written - or even read - a biography herself. The next seven years of intimate conversations, intercontinental research, and peculiar cat-and-mouse games resulted in Samuel Beckett: A Biography, which went on to win the National Book Award and propel Deirdre to her next subject: Simone de Beauvoir. The catch? De Beauvoir and Beckett despised each other - and lived essentially on the same street. While quite literally dodging one subject or the other, and sometimes hiding out in the backrooms of the great cafés of Paris, Bair learned that what works in terms of process for one biography rarely applies to the next. Her seven-year relationship with the domineering and difficult de Beauvoir required a radical change in approach, yielding another groundbreaking literary profile.Drawing on Bair's extensive notes from the period, including never-before-told anecdotes and details that were considered impossible to publish at the time, Parisian Lives is full of personality and warmth and gives us an entirely new window on the all-too-human side of these legendary thinkers.

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