Most Popular Books by Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett''s bleak vision represents the attempts of an honest and heroic artist to find some hope in the no-man''s-land of contemporary existence. His plays for the theatre and radio are imbued with listlessness, desolation and despair, but always some hope of redemption is to be found in the dogged stoicism and sardonic gallows humour of his characters. Like no other dramatist before him, or since, Beckett captured the pathos and ironies of modern life, yet still maintained his faith in man''s capacity for compassion and survival, no matter how absurd his environment may have become.

Plays explore themes such as the manipulation of people by each other, the state''s enslavement of a man, and the hopes and guilts in a man''s past

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.

"The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett is beyond doubt a major contribution to Beckett scholarship and to the study of drama as a genre."--Richard J. Finneran

Collected here in one volume, Samuel Beckett''s three novels, which are among the most beautiful and disquieting of his later prose works, come together with the powerful resonance of his famous Three Novels Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. In Company, a voice comes to one on his back in the dark and speaks to him, describing significant moments in life, and yet we are told it is all a fable, memories or figments devised or imagined for the sake of company. Ill Seen Ill Said focuses attention on an old woman in a cabin who is part of the objects, landscape, rhythms, and movements of an incomprehensible universe. And in Worstward Ho, Beckett explores a tentative, uncertain existence in a world devoid of rational meaning and purpose. Here is language pared down to its most expressive, confirming Beckett''s position as one of the great writers of our time.

One of the most accessible examples of Samuel Beckett''s dark humor, Mercier and Camier is the hilarious chronicle of its two heroes'' epic journey. While their travels are fraught with complications and intrigue, Mercier and Camier at least "did not remove from home, they had that good fortune."

Written in French in the late forties before Waiting for Godot, Eleutheria is about a young man at odds with his middle-class family, living alone in a bedsit and refusing to take part in ''normal'' life while accepting handouts from his mother. Often richly comic, it contains elements of high farce and draws on the traditions of French boulevard comedy and melodrama. This new edition includes the notice by Jérôme Lindon, in its original French, which accompanied the first edition in 1995, explaining the circumstances under which the play was first published.

Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969; his literary output of plays, novels, stories and poetry has earned him an uncontested place as one of the greatest writers of our time. Endgame, originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett himself, is considered by many critics to be his greatest single work. A pinnacle of Beckett’s characteristic raw minimalism, it is a pure and devastating distillation of the human essence in the face of approaching death.

Arena Stage, Zelda Fichandler, producing director, Thomas C. Fichandler, executive director presents Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy in "Two by Samuel Beckett," directed by Alan Schneider, production supervisor, Robert Walter, production coordinator Thomas Lloyd, stage manager Joseph Brocket, "Not I".

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

The first novel by the author of Waiting for Godot centers around the activities of Belacqua, a precursor of the playwright''s more mature Molloy in Molloy.

''Murphy'', Samuel Beckett''s first published novel, was written in English and published in London in 1938; Beckett himself subsequently translated the book into French, and it was published in France in 1947. The novel recounts the hilarious but tragic life of Murphy in London as he attempts to establish a home and to amass sufficient fortune for his intended bride to join him.

Eight short prose pieces, written between 1960 and 1975, continue Beckett''s unsparing and spare-styled exploration of the dark ways and circumscribed passages of twentieth-century life

Beckett''s anti-hero, in these ten short stories, is Belacqua, a Dublin student and philanderer

Essay over het werk van de biseksuele schrijver Marcel Proust.