|
| |
Samuel Beckett
|
Biography:
Born 1906 in Dublin, Ireland. Beckett was born in Dublin.
He was an English teacher at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris,
and while in France
he often associated with James Joyce. He returned to Dublin to teach French at
Trinity
College. Although mostly known for his plays, he also wrote many successful novels and
books
of poetry. He received the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature. Died 1989.
|
Cascando and Other
Short Dramatic Pieces
Paperback (December 1991)
|
Collected Poems in
English and French
Paperback (November 1977)
|
Collected Shorter Plays
Paperback (October 1984)
|
The
Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989
Although Samuel Beckett is best-known for his novels, such as the
Molloy series, and his still frequently-performed plays like Waiting for Godot and
Endgame,
he is rarely thought of as a writer of short fiction and prose. Yet he wrote short works
devotedly throughout his life; many critics count various Beckett short stories as
masterpieces of the form, central to an appreciation of the writer's oeuvre.
The
Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989, as the title suggests, collects all of the Nobel
Prize-winner's shorter works, such as First Love, and The Lost
Ones.
Paperback - 336 pages (April 1997)
|
Dream of Fair to
Middling Women
Now published for the first time - Samuel Beckett's
first novel, written in the Hotel Trianon in Paris in the summer of 1932 when the author
was 26. Recognized as one of the great writers of the 20th-century, Beckett's Waiting
for Godot revolutionized contemporary theater and his fiction is ranked by many with
that of Joyce and Proust.
Hardcover - 241 pages (April 1993)
|
Eleutheria
"The abandoned manuscript of Samuel Beckett's first play,
Eleutheria
has finally found its way into print after a highly dramatic legal and literary battle. It
is clear ... that Eleutheria merits both publication and production, but it must be
placed into perspective. Waiting for Godot is revolutionary; Eleutheria is
evolutionary. The play, a valuable addition to Beckett's body of work, will be of interest
to anyone concerned with the author's art and with exploratory theater."
(The New
York Times Book Review)
"Written almost two years before Waiting for
Godot,
Eleutheria
was not produced or published in Beckett's lifetime. Instead, it lay in a trunk for 40
years until Beckett gave the manuscript to his lifelong friend and publisher, Barney
Rosset, who was long associated with Grove Press. It's a shame the play remained hidden so
long, because although it lacks the power and economy of Godot and later plays, it
still bristles with Beckett's sharp wit and insight about hopelessness, spiritual
exhaustion, and moral paralysis - themes that show up again and again in his later work.
The play even revolves around a young nihilist bohemian named Krapp who bears a passing
resemblance to the protagonist of Krapp's Last Tape. Michael Brodsky's new
translation of the long unavailable play will delight Beckett scholars and aficionados
alike." (Jack Helbig, American Library Association)
Paperback (April 1998)
|
En Attendant Godot
Paperback French edition
|
En Attendant Godot
Paperback (June 1963)
|
Endgame
Paperback (July 1970)
|
Ends and Odds: Nine Dramatic Pieces
Paperback (December 1988)
|
First Love and Other Shorts
Paperback (March 1974)
|
Happy Days: A Play in Two Acts
Paperback (November 1983)
|
How It Is
Paperback (December 1988)
|
I Can't Go On, I'll Go on: A Selection from Samuel
Beckett's Work
Paperback - 621 pages (March 1992)
|
Krapp's Last
Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces
Paperback (May 1969)
|
Mercier and Camier
Paperback (December 1991)
|
Molloy
Paperback (May 1978)
|
Molloy,
Malone Dies, The Unnamable
"More powerful and
important than Godot... Mr. Beckett seeks to empty the novel of its usual recognizable
objects - plot, situation, characters - and yet to keep the reader interested and moved.
Beckett is one of the most positive writers alive. Behind all his mournful blasphemies
against man there is real love. And he is genuine: every sentence is written as if it had
been lived." (New York Times Book Review)
"[Beckett] possesses fierce intellectual honesty, and his
prose has a bare, involuted rhythm that is almost hypnotic." (Time)
"Samuel Beckett is sui generis...He has given a voice to the
decrepit and maimed and inarticulate, men and women at the end of their tether, past pose
or pretense, past claim of meaningful existence. He seems to say that only there and then,
as metabolism lowers, amid God's paucity, not his plenty, can the core of the human
condition be approached...Yet his musical cadences, his wrought and precise sentences,
cannot help but stave off the void...Like salamanders we survive in his fire."
(Richard Ellmann)
"[Beckett] is an incomparable spellbinder...a serious writer
with something serious to say about the human condition." (New York
Times)
Hardcover - 480 pages (September 1997)
|
More Pricks Than Kicks
Paperback (June
1972)
|
Murphy
Paperback (December 1970)
|
No Author
Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett & Alan Schneider
"Samuel Beckett's view of existence seems so remorselessly,
brilliantly bleak that one doesn't expect much in the way of human warmth from his
correspondence. Yet the letters he and director Alan Schneider exchanged over the course
of three decades are full of wit and fellow feeling. The focus, to be sure, is on
Beckett's plays, five of which Schneider premiered in the United States between 1956 and
1983. But that happens to be the perfect conduit for the playwright's praise (often
directed at his acolyte) and disgust (often directed at his audience, his critics, and
himself). When the initial American production of Waiting for Godot bombs in Miami,
for instance, Beckett cheers Schneider on even as he pummels the ticket holders: "It
is probable our conversations confirmed you in your aversion to half-measures and frills,
i.e. to precisely those things that 90% of theatre-goers want. Of course I know the Miami
swells and their live models can hardly be described as theatre-goers and their reactions
are no more significant than those of a Jersey herd and I presume their critics are worthy
of them." No Author Better Served conveys Beckett's sense of humility, which
never failed him, even after Godot made him famous: "Success and failure on
the public level never mattered much to me, in fact I feel much more at home with the
latter, having breathed deep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last
couple of years." It's also a wonderful document of his complete, sometimes nutty,
always inspiring devotion to his art." (James Marcus)
"[Samuel Beckett's] disdain for critics is among revelations
in [this] extraordinary collection of more than 500 letters...The 30-year correspondence
between Beckett and Alan Schneider, who staged the American premieres of dramas such as
Waiting For Godot...is virtually a history of Beckett's growth as a dramatist. The letters
are all the more significant because Beckett rarely discussed his work in public,
dismissing questions with comments such as, 'I meant what I said.' The letters offer an
unparalleled insight into the playwright who died in 1989 at the age of 89 and influenced
writers from Harold Pinter to Tom Stoppard with his poetic pessimism and explorations of
the big questions of human existence." (Dalya Alberge, The Times -UK)
"The playwright was always adamant: productions should
follow his stage directions explicitly. In a new book, No Author Better
Served, a
collection of 30 years of letters between Beckett and his director Alan Schneider, the
playwright offers fascinating insights about performance and interpretation if not
meaning." (Mel Gussow, New York Times)
"[No Author Better Served] has been edited with a useful
introduction and great textual care...Beckett's letters often reveal not only his
uninterrupted faith in Schneider but a charming modesty, an engaging self-deprecation...In
return, Schneider, often using gloomy phrases from Beckett's plays, sends his friend his
despairing reflections on the state of the American theater, American culture and American
politics." (Robert Brustein, New York Times Book Review)
"Because the world of Beckett's plays is so stark and
desolate, many assume that he was, too--aloof, cold and somber. But No Author Better
Served... reveals a different portrait of a writer... The letters show not only a demanding
artist but also a kind and gentle man... This epistolary dialogue reveals a playwright's
vision that gradually transformed our sense of the world and ultimately won the 1969 Nobel
Prize for Literature. The correspondence also shows Schneider's importance in developing
and implementing that vision." (Lisa Meyer, Los Angeles Times)
"Beckett was
adamant about not wanting his letters published, but Beckett was frequently wrong ('I
cannot help feeling,' he writes, 'that the success of Godot has been very largely the
result of a misunderstanding'). Whatever was personal has been excised from the 500
missives that make up this book, but what remains includes vivid and often revelatory
material about his interpretations of his own work. Schneider, who introduced many of the
masterworks to this country, as an able and often provocatively inquisitive correspondent.
The result is an enlightening volume that closes with a Beckettian twist: Schneider died
in 1984 in an accident as he was crossing a street to mail a letter to Beckett."
(San
Francisco Examiner)
"Beckett's responses...are always entertaining and often
enlightening. The book is sure to become required reading for graduate students and is a
must for anyone interested in staging any one of Beckett's self-proclaimed
'monsters." (Chris Davis, Memphis Flyer)
"It is only with the publication of the correspondence, of
which that with Schneider is a small yet vital part, that the extent of Beckett's
investment in the practicalities of the world can be fully appreciated. He was one of the
great letter-writers of our era, indeed of any era: not just by the volume of his
correspondents and letters...[but] by the extraordinary quality of his attentiveness, both
to the person he was addressing and to whatever they were discussing. His letters have an
utter lack of pretension or posture, reminiscent of Kafka's in their luminous
directness...What is unique about this correspondence is the fact that...both sides
survive almost intact, a witness to thirty years of intense and fertile exchange.
Schneider's energy bristles on every page...Harvard University press has done a fine job
on this volume, leaving just enough blank page to let each letter breathe. The editor,
Maurice Harmon, presents a virtually flawless text, having painstakingly transcribed what
Beckett termed his 'foul fist', a hand so difficult that even Schneider often deciphered
it in installments. Harmon provides a serviceable introduction, with an overview of the
friendship, and his unobtrusive notes list the casts, theatres and principal reviews of
the most important productions." (Dan Gunn, Times Literary Supplement - UK)
"Maurice Harmon's scrupulously edited volume is absolutely
essential reading for all students of Beckett and for anyone with even a passing interest
in the terrors, ignominy and glorious rewards of theatre. The editor is to be complimented
for his honoring of the Beckett Estate's request for the exclusion from the letters of
matter merely personal and private...Such editorial tact is rare and welcome. This is a
volume to visit and revisit and deeply breathe of its 'vivifying air." (Gerry Dukes,
Irish Independent)
"Given that his characters have such a fractured,
antagonistic relationship with the world, you might imagine Beckett himself to have been
locked in a kind of manic Salinger-like seclusion. Not at all: the sense of the man you
get from the letters here is of a highly considerate, friendly and decent human being-and
one who has no more problems dealing with the quotidian than you or I...It is almost funny
to think of Beckett in the real world; which is probably one reason why he was stalked by
so many devotees, anxious to touch the hem of his garment. And it is why this
correspondence, ably and tactfully edited, will be happily fallen on by academics,
students, and cranky fans...who will recognize it as a mother load of tangential
information... There could be no comparable correspondence, I think, about his
prose." (Nicholas Lezard, Sunday Times - UK)
"[These letters are] of particular interest in matters of
Beckett's stagecraft and self-interpretation...The notoriously demanding playwright
favored Schneider, as Maurice Harmon explains in his concisely excellent introduction,
because Schneider 'did not intrude upon the work but submitted himself attentively to it,
discovering its imaginative inner life'...Scrupulous, too, is editor Harmon who supplies
useful and thorough notes for each letter. Taken together, the Beckett-Schneider letters
also offer a unique overview of Beckett's stage work in the US...We are privy to their
expert comments on the successes and failures of other Beckett productions here and
abroad...A well-edited set of documents that will be uniquely invaluable to students of
Beckett's works and of the American theater." (Kirkus Reviews)
Hardcover - 512 pages (October 1998)
|
Nohow on
- Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho (Three Novels)
Beckett has few imitators these days, when story is all to most
novelists, but he remains a writer of unquestionable stature. Nohow On: Company, Ill
Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho: Three Novels and its companion volume Samuel Beckett:
The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 assemble virtually all of Beckett's prose work
outside his sequence of major novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, and
The Unnamable.
Paperback (November 1995)
|
Rockaby and Other Short
Pieces
Paperback (April 1981)
|
Samuel
Beckett - The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989
"The plain reader be damned," declared the young Samuel
Beckett in an essay in Transition, the Parisian journal where some of his first
poetry and prose appeared. Plain readers have been grappling with Beckett's thorny,
modernist work ever since. Some of the stories collected in Samuel Beckett: The
Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 and its companion volume Nohow On:
Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho: Three Novels seem almost approachable,
while such exercises in oddity as the 13 Texts for Nothing seem more impenetrable
by the day.
"Beckett was a standard-bearer for the avant-garde, so it's
been easy to overlook how oddly old-fashioned a writer he also was. The informing
sensibility of his work can seem remote, Edwardian even: the high poeticism - all shadows,
staring skulls, and scattered flowers - verges on symboliste affectation; the vaudevillian
scurrilities seem no less arch and worn. Of course the difficult trick of Beckett's art,
displayed in wonderfully weird stories like First Love, was to convert these
exhausted properties into occasions of enduring surprise. Beckett's short prose is a major
part of his achievement and especially close to his heart. All the more pity that this
book isn't in fact complete: the publisher has chosen opportunistically to relegate the
early stories of More Pricks than Kicks and the late trilogy of Worstward Ho,
Company, and Ill Seen, Ill Said, to separate volumes. (Boston
Review)
"There had to be a Samuel Beckett. The literary cosmos had
to contain at least one writer who could distill the human condition down to its
essentials in prose as spare and rhythmic as breath. Beckett is the master of the tight
focus, of watching us put one foot in front of the other, and his fierce attention to
matters of the body serves to unleash the crazy chant of the mind. These distinguishing
traits are found in many brilliant, sometimes maddening variations in Beckett's short
fiction. In his fine introduction to this unprecedented collection, Beckett scholar
Gontarski describes these pieces as a "major creative outlet" for Beckett and
then ponders the question of why these works are so little known. He places Beckett's
short fiction firmly within the context of the Irish storytelling tradition and analyzes
its "direct dramatic and poetic simplicity." The collection's chronological
arrangement - from "Assumption," Beckett's first published story, written in
1929 when he was 23, to "Stirrings Still," written just before his death, 60
years later--reveals the evolution of Beckett's resonant oeuvre and allows us to
appreciate anew his wry and piercing vision." (Donna Seaman,
American Library Association)
Hardcover (May 1996)
|
Waiting for Godot
The difference between Beckett's original French text and its
English translation are considered in this critical study of his best-known dramatic work
and its liberating influence on other playwrights.
Paperback - 114 pages (December 1989)
|
Stories and Texts for Nothing
Paperback (December 1988)
|
Theatre One
Hardcover (June 1980)
|
Three
Novels by Samuel Beckett - Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
Paperback (November 1995)
|
Three Plays - Ohio,
Impromptu Catastrophe, What Where
Paperback Reprint edition (September 1989)
|
Waiting for Godot
Tragicomedy in two acts by Samuel Beckett, published in 1952 in
French as En attendant Godot and first produced in 1953. Waiting for Godot
was a true
innovation in drama and the Theater of the Absurd's first theatrical success. The play
consists of conversations between Vladimir and Estragon, who are waiting for the arrival
of the mysterious Godot, who continually sends word that he will appear but who never
does. They encounter Lucky and Pozzo, they discuss their miseries and their lots in life,
they consider hanging themselves, and yet they wait. Often perceived as being tramps,
Vladimir and Estragon are a pair of human beings who do not know why they were put on
earth; they make the tenuous assumption that there must be some point to their existence,
and they look to Godot for enlightenment. Because they hold out hope for meaning and
direction, they acquire a kind of nobility that enables them to rise above their futile
existence. (The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, April 1, 1995)
Paperback - 60 pages (August 1997)
|
Watt
Paperback (December 1970)
|
Worstward Ho
Paperback (May 1984) |
|
