Ends and Odds

by Samuel Beckett

Published 1 December 1976

I Can't Go On, I'll Go on

by Samuel Beckett

Published 1 December 1976


Molloy

by Samuel Beckett

Published 1 December 1955
Molloy is Samuel Beckett's best-known novel, and his first published work to be written in French, ushering in a period of concentrated creativity in the late 1940s which included the companion novels Malone Dies and The Unnamable. The narrative of Molloy, old and ill, remembering and forgetting, scarcely human, begets a parallel tale of the spinsterish Moran, a private detective sent in search of him, whose own deterioration during the quest joins in with the catalogue of Molloy's woes. Molloy brings a world into existence with finicking certainties, at the tip of whoever is holding the pencil, and trades larger uncertainties with the reader.

Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.

Edited by Shane Weller

How It Is

by Samuel Beckett

Published 1 December 1965

Published in French in 1961, and in English in 1964, How It Is is a novel in three parts, written in short paragraphs, which tell (abruptly, cajolingly, bleakly) of a narrator lying in the dark, in the mud, repeating his life as he hears it uttered - or remembered - by another voice. Told from within, from the dark, the story is tirelessly and intimately explicit about the feelings that pervade his world, but fragmentary and vague about all else therein or beyond.

Together with Molloy, How It Is counts for many readers as Beckett's greatest accomplishment in the novel form. It is also his most challenging narrative, both stylistically and for the pessimism of its vision, which continues the themes of reduced circumstance, of another life before the present, and the self-appraising search for an essential self, which were inaugurated in the great prose narratives of his earlier trilogy.

she sits aloof ten yards fifteen yards she looks up looks at me says at last to herself all is well he is working my head where is my head it rests on the table my hand trembles on the table she sees I am not sleeping the wind blows tempestuous the little clouds drive before it the table glides from light to darkness darkness to light

Edited by Edouard Magessa O'Reilly


Waiting for Godot

by Samuel Beckett

Published 1 June 1954

Subtitled 'A tragicomedy in two Acts', and famously described by the Irish critic Vivien Mercier as a play in which 'nothing happens, twice', En attendant Godot was first performed at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris in 1953. It was translated into English by Samuel Beckett, and Waiting for Godot opened at the Arts Theatre in London in 1955.

'Go and see Waiting for Godot. At the worst you will discover a curiosity, a four-leaved clover, a black tulip; at the best something that will securely lodge in a corner of your mind for as long as you live.' Harold Hobson, 7 August 1955

'I told him that if by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot. This seemed to disappoint him greatly.' Samuel Beckett, 1955


From the mid-1960s, Samuel Beckett himself directed all his major plays in Berlin, Paris, and London. For most of these productions he meticulously prepared notebooks for his personal use.

The theatrical notebooks of Beckett that are reproduced in facsimile here are translated and annotated and thus offer a remarkable record of his own involvement with the staging of his texts. They present his solutions to practical problems but also provide a unique insight into the ways he envisaged his plays. With additional information taken from Beckett's own annotated and corrected copies, the editors have been able to constitute a new revised text for each of these major plays.

Waiting for Godot shows for the first time the extensive revisions made by Beckett during revivals of the play. This volume is in part a facsimile, with transcription and commentary, of the notebook kept by Beckett for Berlin's Schiller Theater production in 1975. It contains a full set of directorial notes, and discloses, section by section, a total system that works by repetition and analogy, musical rhythm, and echo, establishing subtle patterns of sound, movement, and gestures.


Disjecta

by Samuel Beckett and Ruby Cohn

Published September 1983
"[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.




Stories and Texts for Nothing

by Samuel Beckett

Published 13 January 1994
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.

Includes:

"The Expelled"

"The Calmative"

"The End"

Texts for Nothing (1-10)