Most Popular Books by Samuel Beckett

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Vol III of the four-volume series reproducing Beckett''s theatrical notebooks in facsimile - now in affordable paperback edition.

Renowned Beckett scholar Ruby Cohn has selected some of Beckett''s criticisms, reviews, letters, and other unpublished materials that shed new light on his work.

Samuel Beckett''s celebrated early study of Marcel proust, whose theories of time were to play a large part in his own work, was written in 1931. It is a brilliant work of critical insight that also tells us much about its author''s own thinking and preoccupations. In its own right it is a masterpiece of literary and philosophical creative writing. This edition was published in 1999 - ten years after the writer''s death. The volume also contains the equally celebrated dialogues with the art critic Georges Duthuit - written to record their different points of view after the discussions took place. Beckett always let Duthuit win, but his very unusual and often opposite point of view on the nature and purpose of art is all the more forceful and memorable on that account.

"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

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

Samuel Beckett, one of the great avant-garde Irish dramatists and writers of the second half of the twentieth century, was born on 13 April 1906. His centenary will be celebrated throughout 2006 with performances of his major plays, including Waiting for Godot. Here are the two most famous plays for solo voice. Krapp''s Last Tape finds an old man, with his tape recorder, musing over the past and future. Not I is a remarkable tour de force for a single actress, as a woman emits memories and fears. Also included are two other singular short dramas for single voice, That Time read by John Moffatt and A Piece of Monologue read by Peter Marinker.

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.

Molloy [1951] utgår från titelfigurens upptäckt att han befinner sig i sin moders rum, utan att veta hur han hamnade där. Första delen i Becketts klassiska trilogi blandar humor och förtvivlan, tragedi och anarkistisk komedi, grotesk realism och drömlik poesi och anses allmänt som författarens bästa enskilda roman. Samuel Beckett föddes 1906 i Dublin av irländska föräldrar och var bosatt i Frankrike från 1938 till sin död. Hans mest kända romaner och pjäser, bland demI väntan på Godot och Trilogin, skrevs på franska. 1969 mottog han Nobelpriset i litteratur. Romanerna Molloy, Malone dör och Den Onämnbare samlas nu för första gången på svenska i en volym, i översättning av Lill-Inger Eriksson och med förord av Jesper Olsson. Pressröster »Att som vuxen tillåtas tillträde till den existentiella zon där varje liten rörelse framstår som ny och outforskad är lika omtumlande som den första förälskelsen. Det går igenom hela nervsystemet.« Anna Hallberg, Dagens Nyheter »Jag skulle kunna gå i pension, binda fast mig vid en stol och ägna all min vakna tid åt Molloy, Malone dör och Den onämnbare.« Jenny Tunedal, Aftonbladet

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."

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.

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.

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

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".

A dying man explores his imagination and begins to lose his identity.

''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.

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

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

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.