Samuel Beckett

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, to time past and time present. Once again, stripping theater to its barest essentials, Happy Days offers only two characters: Winnie, a woman of about fifty, and Willie, a man of about sixty. In the first act, Winnie is buried up to her waist in a mound of earth, but...

This volume brings together three of Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett's major short stories and thirteen shorter pieces of fiction that he calls 'texts for nothing.' Here, as in all his work, Beckett relentlessly strips away all but the essential to arrive at a core of truth. His prose reveals the same mastery that marks his work from Waiting for Godot and Endgame to Molloy and Malone Dies. In each of the three stories, old men displaced or expelled...

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 black comedy that, at its core, is rooted in the powerful and terrifying vision that made Beckett one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century....

Mercier and Camier, Beckett's first postwar novel and his first in French, has been described as a forerunner of his most famous work, Waiting for Godot. Like the play, Mercier and Camier revolves around two wandering vagabonds. Their journey is described as relatively easy going, with no frontiers or seas to be crossed. The reader never knows where the journey starts or where it ends and the novel is less about the characters' physical progress than...

A complete edition of Beckett's poetry and verse translations. "Samuel Beckett began his career by publishing poems in literary reviews in Paris during the 1930s, and--although primarily considered a playwright and novelist--he continued writing poetry throughout his life. This new, definitive volume presents Beckett's poetry in the order it was composed, from prewar to postwar, and contains previously unpublished and never-before- reprinted work....