Best Selling Books by Samuel Beckett

Two old tramps wait on a bare stretch of road near a tree for Godot.

This work relates the adventures of an unnamed narrator crawling through the mud while dragging a sack of canned food. It is written as a sequence of unpunctuated paragraphs divided into three sections.

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 acclaimed as central to their time and to our understanding of the human experience.

Characters relate in detail the experiences which shaped their personalities or reflect them vividly.

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.

In honor of the centenary of Samuel Beckett''s birth, this bilingual edition of "Waiting for Godot" features side-by-side text in French and English so readers can experience the mastery of Beckett''s language and explore the nuances of his creativity.

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 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 still has the use of her arms and few earthly possessions—toothbrush, tube of toothpaste, small mirror, revolver, handkerchief, spectacles; in the second act she is embedded up to her neck and can move only her eyes. Willie lives and moves—on all fours—behind the mound, appearing intermittently and replying only occasionally into Winnie’s long monologue, but the knowledge of his presence is a source of comfort and inspiration to her, and doubtless the prerequisite for all her “happy days.”

Murphy, Samuel Beckett’s first published novel, is set in London and Dublin, during the first decades of the Irish Republic. The title character loves Celia in a “striking case of love requited” but must first establish himself in London before his intended bride will make the journey from Ireland to join him. Beckett comically describes the various schemes that Murphy employs to stretch his meager resources and the pastimes that he uses to fill the hours of his days. Eventually Murphy lands a job as a nurse at Magdalen Mental Mercyseat hospital, where he is drawn into the mad world of the patients which ends in a fateful game of chess. While grounded in the comedy and absurdity of much of daily life, Beckett’s work is also an early exploration of themes that recur throughout his entire body of work including sanity and insanity and the very meaning of life.

"In the first part of this book, Beckett, a notably reclusive man, talks candidly with his official biographer, James Knowlson, about his family, his youth, his school years in Dublin, his early life in Paris as lecteur at the famed Ecole Normale Superieure, his friendship with James Joyce, his work in the French resistance movement during the Nazi occupation, his precipitous flight from Paris when his involvement was discovered by the Gestapo, his clandestine years in the Vaucluse region of southern France, his postwar volunteer work with the Irish Red Cross Hospital in Saint-Lo, and his return to Paris in the late 1940s to resume his literary life." "In the second part, friends and colleagues share their memories of Beckett as a schoolboy, a teacher, a struggling young writer, and a sudden success in 1953 with the appearance of Waiting for Godot, which propelled him from virtual unknown to world-renowned. Actors with whom he worked, including Hume Cronyn, Jean Martin, Jessica Tandy, and Billie Whitelaw, relate their experiences; fellow playwrights and authors Edward Albee, Paul Auster, E. M. Cioran, J. M. Coetzee, Eugene Ionesco, Edna O''Brien, and Tom Stoppard speak of his work and its influence on theirs. One entire chapter is devoted to Beckett as director, for as time went on Beckett, first modestly, then authoritatively, oversaw the direction of many of his plays in France, Germany, and England."--BOOK JACKET.

Belacqua''s love is divided between two women, Smeraldina-Rima and the Alba.

The 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 Kenner Contents: 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.

Samuel Beckett, the great minimalist master and winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature, has produced some of his most widely praised work for the stage in the form of the shorter play. This complete and definitive collection of twenty-five plays and "playlets" includes Beckett''s celebrated Krapp''s Last Tape, Embers, Cascando, Play, Eh Joe, Not I, and Footfalls, as well as his mimes, all his radio and television plays, his screenplay for Film, his adaptation of Robert Pignet''s The Old Tune, and more recent Catastrophe, What Where, Quad, and Night and Dreams. Includes: All That Fall Act Without Words I Act Without Words II Krapp''s Last Tape Rough for Theatre I Rough for Theatre II Embers Rough for Radio I Rough for Radio II 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 Träume What Where

Samuel Beckett claimed he couldn''t talk about his work, but he proves remarkably forthcoming in these pages, which document the thirty-year working relationship between the playwright and his principal producer in the United States, Alan Schneider. The 500 letters capture the world of theater as well as the personalities of their authors.

Fremtidsvision af alt livs forsvinden her på jorden

A collection of ten short stories tracing the career of Belacqua Shuah. Belacqua--the first of Beckett''s anti-heroes, a student, philanderer, and failure--studies Dante, carries on an ill-fated courtship, witnesses grotesque incidents in the streets of Dublin, attends vapid parties, endures a troubled marriage, and finally meets an accidental death. The work reveals the early stages of one of Beckett''s underlying themes, bewilderment in the face of suffering.

Beschrijving van de simpele, zich steeds wijzigende situatie waarin een oude eenzame vrouw verkeert

The third of the three greatest novels by the era-defining Nobel laureate , reissued for a new generation. I can''t go on, I''ll go on. The Unnamable is a voice. Is it curled up inside an urn, on the point of being born, or is it about to die? Haunted by visitors, it weeps. The Unnamable sifts disjointed memories, grapples with the problem of existence and ultimately perpetuates itself through an endless stream of fragmented words. The Unnamable is the last of the three great novels Samuel Beckett produced during his ''frenzy of writing'' in the late 1940s. The others are Molloy and Malone Dies.

This collection gathers together the Nobel Prize-winning writer Samuel Beckett''s English poems (including Whoroscope, his first published verse), English translations of poems by Eluard, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and Chamfort, and poems in French, several of which are presented in translation.

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 their exchanges regarding the meaning of their journey, their goals, and life in general. One of Beckett’s more accessible works, Mercier and Camier is one of his early endeavors to experiment with structure and reimagine the novel as it had been known.

“[Beckett] is a serious writer with something serious to say about the human condition: and therefore one of the dozen or so writers those who are concerned with modern man in search of his soul should read.”—Stephen Spender, The New York Times Renowned Beckett scholar Ruby Cohn has selected some of Beckett''s criticisms, reviews, letters, and other unpublished materials that shed new light on his work.

Presents the dramatic text for two of Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett''s works, featuring a single-act play that illustrates the repetitiousness of life, and a single-person mime sketch depicting the frustration of living in a hostile environment.

By the winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature A dense inner monologue, Stirrings Still was written by Beckett in 1987 and 1988, when he had become increasingly reflective about his life. It portrays, in Beckett’s spare style, a “consciousness” exploring a “self,” faced with uncertainties about its own existence. Stirrings Still is a spellbinding work, full of a sense of farewell. It is dedicated to Beckett’s longtime friend and publisher Barney Rosset. Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) was a playwright, poet and novelist whose work has had a formative influence on 20th century culture. Born in Foxrock, Ireland, he moved to Paris after an abortive attempt at being an academic. Years of penury and obscurity followed, during which time he consorted with artists such as James Joyce, Alberto Giacometti, and Marcel Duchamp. During World War II, he was an active member of the French Resistance, and after the war he was honored with the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance. In 1954, Beckett’s play “Waiting for Godot” was introduced to an unsuspecting America by Barney Rosset at Grove Press; Beckett became a signature author of the fledgling company. Although he was highly regarded by a small circle of literary aficionados, it was not until Beckett won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969 (he famously gave away the prize money that accompanied it) that his work began to reach a wider audience. His writing is characterized by meticulousness and a ceaseless fascination with the puzzle of fitting words to actions, and with the simultaneous impossibility and necessity of doing so that marks the human condition.

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.

Over de pijn van het menselijk tekort

Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett was one of the most profoundly original writers of the 20th century. He gave expression to the anguish and isolation of the individual consciousness with a purity and minimalism that have altered the shape of world literature. A tremendously influential poet and dramatist, Beckett spoke of his prose fiction as the "important writing," the medium in which he distilled his ideas most powerfully. Here, for the first time, his short prose is gathered in a definitive, complete volume by leading Beckett scholar S. E. Gontarski.

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 from the modest corners where they have been living bestir themselves in search of new corners. Told, "You can''t stay here, " they somehow, doggedly, inevitably, go on.