Best Selling Books by Samuel Beckett

A miscellany of criticism and a dramatic fragment.

By the winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature Before the classic Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett wrote Eleuthéria. Legend has it that the great French director Roger Blin was given his choice of the two plays. Waiting for Godot won out.Eleuthéria, which has seventeen characters and elaborate and numerous scene changes, was virtually forgotten for the next forty years. As Beckett scholars have noted, elements in Eleuthéria prefigure many of the themes and characters of Beckett’s most important plays. Beyond the historical interest of this “lost” work, there is also the mesmerizing quality of the master playwright’s language. 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.

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

"The present volume consists of those poems written in the English language which the author is willing to have preserved. It also contains a few poems written in French, translated by Beckett himself, together with the original texts" -- Dust jacket.

"This volume brings together twenty-seven essays, interviews and reminiscences dealing with the man who has often been called our greatest living author. Samuel Beckett is eighty this year, and On Beckett includes commentary that spans the career of the Nobel Prize winner, from early French criticism to accounts of the staging of the latest short dramatic pieces. The anthology contains rarely seen sources and viewpoints on Beckett. Many of the pieces were written by those who have known and worked with him"--Introduction.

Originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett, Endgame was given its first London performance at the Royal Court Theatre in 1957. HAMM: Clov! CLOV: Yes. HAMM: Nature has forgotten us. CLOV: There''s no more nature. HAMM: No more nature! You exaggerate. CLOV: In the vicinity. HAMM: But we breathe, we change! We lose our hair our teeth! Our bloom! Our ideals! CLOV: Then she hasn''t forgotten us.

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."

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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.

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

In ''Happy Days, '' 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.