Increasingly Samuel Beckett is seen as the culmination of the great literature of the twentieth century - the successor to Proust, Joyce and Kafka, and a writer whose relevance to his time and use of poetic imagery can be compared to Shakespeare's in the late Renaissance. But John Calder has examine[...]
Like all the greatest writers, Samuel Beckett was primarily interested in discovering the meaning and purpose of life and of the world into which we are born. Knowledgeable about the religion his family and education instilled in him, which as an adult he could neither accept nor reject, he used it [...]
Ranging widely over Beckett's fiction, drama and critical writings, the book demonstrates that it is through Beckett's comic timing that we can understand the double gesture of his art: the ethical obligation to represent the world how it is while, at the same time, opening up a space for how it oug[...]
This title features newly commissioned, innovative essays on Samuel Beckett and the arts in the broadest sense. This Companion captures the continued vitality of Beckett studies in the visual arts, drama and music as well as considering topics such as Beckett and science, historiography, geocriticis[...]
In 1933, Chatto & Windus agreed to publish Samuel Beckett's More Pricks Than Kicks, a collection of ten interrelated stories--his first published work of fiction. At his editor's request, Beckett penned an additional story, Echo's Bones, to serve as the final piece. However, he'd already killed off [...]
A woman imprisoned in a mound of earth and a man compelled to remain in her presence rationalize their "happy" existence together[...]
Gathers the Nobel Prize winning poet and dramatist's short prose into one volume that affords the reader a view of Beckett's development as an artist[...]
The Nobel Prize winning author Samuel Beckett is a literary treasure, and this work represents the only comprehensive reference to the concepts, characters, and biographical details mentioned by, or related to, Beckett. Painstakingly and lovingly compiled by acclaimed Beckett scholars C.J. Ackerley [...]
Damned to Fame is the brilliant and insightful portrait of Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett, mysterious and reclusive master of twentieth-century literature. Professor James Knowlson, Beckett's chosen biographer and a leading authority on Beckett, vividly recreates Beckett's life from his b[...]
In "Happy Days," Samuel Beckett pursues his relentless search for the meaning of existence, probing the tenuous relationships that bind one person to another, and each to the universe, top time past and time present. Once again, stripping theater to its barest essentials, "Happy Days" offers only tw[...]
From 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[...]
In prose possessed of the radically stripped-down beauty and ferocious wit that characterize his work, this early novel by Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett recounts the grotesque and improbable adventures of a fantastically logical Irish servant and his master. "Watt" is a beautifully executed blac[...]
'First Love', a man's musings about his youth occasioned by his visit to his father's grave, was first written by Samuel Beckett in French in 1945, but it wasn't until 1973 that he completed this the English translation.[...]
Molloy, the first of the three masterpieces which constitute Samuel Beckett's famous trilogy, appeared in French in 1951, followed seven months later by Malone Dies (Malone meurt) and two years later by The Unnamable (L'Innommable). Few works of contemporary literature have been so universally accla[...]
Beckett's anti-hero, in these ten short stories, is Belacqua, a Dublin student and philanderer
An Irish valet enters the slough of despond when he is unable to cope with reality
Samuel Beckett, who wrote everything in both French and English, specialised in short enigmatic texts, implying vast visionary works of which the stories are broken pieces. Kenner's guide is designed to help readers see beyond the story in Beckett to the text as a whole and to appreciate the uniquen[...]
This study focuses on the deceptive roles of three motifs in Beckett's plays. It discusses the contradictory doubleness of the Beckettian life and the dynamic interactions of its polarities. For an appreciation of the dialogic nature of the Beckettian world, the study applies Derrida's idea of "diff[...]
Stories for Nothing: Samuel Beckett s Narrative Poetics is the first book to examine Samuel Beckett s trilogy and post-trilogy works, specifically in terms of their divergent approaches to narrative subjectivity. By comparing the narrational processes of Molloy, Malone meurt, and L Innommable, Paul [...]