Best Selling Books by Samuel Beckett

Written over three months in 1946, ''Mercier and Camier'' was Beckett''s first post-war work, and his first novel in French. He came to regard it as a practice piece, and set it aside to write his trilogy. The novel was finally published in 1970, and in Beckett''s English translation four years later.

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York Times Renowned Beckett scholar Ruby Cohn has selected some of Beckett''s criticisms, reviews, letters, and other unpublished materials that shed new light on his work.

"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

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 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.

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.

Samuel Beckett’s first novel and “literary landmark” (St. Petersburg Times), Dream of Fair to Middling Women is a wonderfully savory introduction to the Nobel Prize–winning author. Written in the summer of 1932, when the twenty-six-year-old Beckett was poor and struggling to make ends meet, the novel offers a rare and revealing portrait of the artist as a young man. Later on, Beckett would call the novel “the chest into which I threw all my wild thoughts.” When he submitted it to several publishers, all of them found it too literary, too scandalous, or too risky; it was never published during his lifetime. As the story begins, Belacqua—a young version of Molloy, whose love is divided between two women, Smeraldina-Rima and the little Alba—“wrestles with his lusts and learning across vocabularies and continents, before a final ‘relapse into Dublin’” (The New Yorker). Youthfully exuberant and visibly influenced by Joyce, Dream of Fair to Middling Women is a work of extraordinary virtuosity. Beckett delights in the wordplay and sheer joy of language that mark his later work. Above all, the story brims with the black humor that, like brief stabs of sunlight, pierces the darkness of his vision.

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.

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.

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".

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