'Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful.' This line, from the play, was adopted by Jean Anouilh, to characterize the first production of "Waiting For Godot" at the Theatre de Babylone, in 1953. He went on to predict that the play would, in time, represent the most important premiere to be staged in Paris for forty years. Nobody acquainted with Beckett's masterly black comedy would now question this prescient recognition of a classic of twentieth-century literature.

The present volume gathers all of Beckett's texts for theatre, from 1955 to 1984. It includes both the major dramatic works and the short and more compressed texts for the stage and for radio. 'He believes in the cadence, the comma, the bite of word on reality, whatever else he believes; and his devotion to them, he makes clear, is a sufficient focus for the reader's attention. In the modern history of literature he is a unique moral figure, not a dreamer of rose-gardens but a cultivator of what will grow in the waste land, who can make us see the exhilarating design that thorns and yucca share with whatever will grow anywhere.' - Hugh Kenner Contents: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, All That Fall, Acts Without Words, Krapp's Last Tape, Roughs for the Theatre, Embers, Roughs for the Radio, 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 Traume, What Where.

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 Theatre 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

In Happy Days, Samuel 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, top time past and time present. Once again, stripping theater to its barest essentials, Happy Days offers only two characters: Winnie, a woman of about fifty, and Willie, a man of about sixty. In the first act Winnie is buried up to her waist in a mound of earth, but still has the use of her arms and few earthly possessions--toothbrush, tube of toothpaste, small mirror, revolver, handkerchief, spectacles; in the second act she is embedded up to her neck and can move only her eyes. Willie lives and moves--on all fours--behind the mound, appearing intermittently and replying only occasionally into Winnie's long monologue, but the knowledge of his presence is a source of comfort and inspiration to her, and doubtless the prerequisite for all her "happy days."

Performed across the globe by some of the world's most iconic performers, Samuel Beckett's indelible masterpiece remains an unwavering testament of what it means to be human. From an inauspicious beginning at the tiny Left Bank Theatre de Babylone in 1953, followed by bewilderment among American and British audiences, Waiting for Godot has become of the most important and enigmatic plays of the past fifty years and a cornerstone of twentieth-century drama. As Clive Barnes wrote, "Time catches up with genius ... Waiting for Godot is one of the masterpieces of the century." The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone--or something--named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree, inhabiting a drama spun of their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as mankind's inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett's language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existential post-World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of our time.

The Unnamable - so named because he knows not who he may be - is from a nameless place. He speaks of previous selves ('all these Murphys, Molloys, and Malones...') as diversions from the need to stop speaking altogether. But, as with the other novels in the trilogy, the prose is full of marvellous precisions, full of its own reasons for keeping going. ...perhaps the words have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

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.

Happy Days was written in 1960 and first produced in London at the Royal Court Theatre in November 1962. WINNIE: [ . . .] Well anyway - this man Shower - or Cooker - no matter - and the woman - hand in hand - in the other hands bags - kind of big brown grips - standing there gaping at me [...] - What's she doing? he says - What's the idea? he says - stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground - coarse fellow - What does it mean? he says - What's it meant to mean? - and so on - lot more stuff like that - usual drivel - Do you hear me? He says - I do, she says, God help me - What do you mean, he says, God help you? (stops filing nails, raises head, gazes front.) And you, she says, what's the idea of you, she says, what are you meant to mean?

Well, thought Belacqua, it's a quick death, God help us all.

It is not.

'Dante and the Lobster' is the first of the linked short stories in Samuel Beckett's first book, More Pricks Than Kicks. Published in 1934, its style was recognisably indebted to that of his mentor, James Joyce, and crammed with linguistic texture and allusion that Beckett later shed. The book baffled many critics and sold so few copies that several batches were pulped.

Decades later, this story was hailed as the Nobel Prize-winner's earliest important work.

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.

It was as a poet that Samuel Beckett launched himself in the little reviews of 1930s Paris, and as a poet that he ended his career. The Collected Poems is the most complete edition of Beckett's poetry and verse translations ever to be published, as well as the first critical edition. It establishes a significant new canon, and the commentary draws on a wide range of published sources, manuscripts and Beckett's extensive correspondence. The notes place each poem in context, detailing the history and circumstances of its composition; they indicate significant variants and help explain obscure turns of phrase and allusions (frequently sourced to Beckett's notebooks); they also identify resonances between poems and across Beckett's work as a whole. The commentary is written in a lively and engaging style and is intended equally for the general reader, the student of modernism and the Beckett specialist. Part of a landmark publishing project to publish edited and corrected texts of all of Beckett's works.

Written in Roussillon during World War Two, while Samuel Beckett was hiding from the Gestapo, Watt was first published in 1953. Beckett acknowledged that this comic novel unlike any other 'has its place in the series' - those masterpieces running from Murphy to the Trilogy, Waiting for Godot and beyond. It shares their sense of a world in crisis, their profound awareness of the paradoxes of being, and their distrust of the rational universe. Watt tells the tale of Mr Knott's servant and his attempts to get to know his master. Watt's mistake is to derive the essence of his master from the accidentals of his being, and his painstakingly logical attempts to 'know' ultimately consign him to the asylum. Itself a critique of error, Watt has previously appeared in editions that are littered with mistakes, both major and minor. The new Faber edition offers for the first time a corrected text based on a scholarly appraisal of the manuscripts and textual history.

Written in French and first performed at the Théâtre du Bablyone in Paris, in 1953, En attendant Godot was subsequently translated by Samuel Beckett into English as Waiting for Godot. It was performed at the Arts Theatre in London in 1955, and first published by Faber in 1956. To mark the centenary of Beckett's birth and the fiftieth anniversary of its original publication, Faber are now publishing for the first time a bilingual edition of this great masterpiece. Subtitled 'a tragicomedy in two acts', and once famously described by the Irish critic Vivian Mercier as a play in which 'nothing happens, twice'. Waiting for Godot is also a play that was written twice. Here, on facing pages, the reader can watch it unfold simultaneously in two languages.

In Waiting for Godot, two wandering tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait by a lonely tree, to meet up with Mr. Godot, an enigmatic figure in a world where time, place and memory are blurred and meaning is where you find it. The tramps hope that Godot will change their lives for the better. Instead, two eccentric travelers arrive, one man on the end of the other's rope. The results are both funny and dangerous in this existential masterpiece.

This book contains the English and French texts and a complete record of the genesis of each. Besides CommentC'est How It Is, O'Reilly has included L'Image and an excerpt from Comment C'est that was published later inanother volume.

Edited by Paul Auster, this four-volume set of Beckett's canon has been designed by award-winner Laura Lindgren. Available individually, as well as in a boxed set, the four hardcover volumes have been specially bound with covers featuring images central to Beckett's works. Typographical errors that remained uncorrected in the various prior editions have now been corrected in consultation with Beckett scholars C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski.
"A man speaking English beautifully chooses to speak in French, which he speaks with greater difficulty, so that he is obliged to choose his words carefully, forced to give up fluency and to find the hard words that come with difficulty, and then after all that finding he puts it all back into English, a new English containing all the difficulty of the French, of the coining of thought in a second language, a new English with the power to change English forever. This is Samuel Beckett. This is his great work. It is the thing that speaks. Surrender." -- Salman Rushdie, from his Introduction

This volume completes the publication of this series of notebooks, the plays in question being Play, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Footfalls, That Time and What Where. Professor Gontarski brings his own experience as a director to editing this book, which provides a continuing revelation of the playwright's approach to the staging of his work. To these 'shorter plays' Samuel Beckett devoted the same care and attention to the details of textual revision and stagecraft as he did to the full-length works, and this book contains revised texts prepared on the same editorial basis as before.

Samuel Beckett directed Krapp's Last Tape on four separate occasions: this volume offers a facsimile of his 1969 Schiller-Theater notebook. Professor Knowlson writes that in these notes 'we see Beckett simplifying, shaping and refining, as he works towards a realization of the play that will function well dramatically. The material reveals a flexibility and openness of approach often considered alien to Beckett's ways of working in the theatre.' The Schiller notebook also contains some of the most explicit analysis by Beckett of his own work ever revealed. The revised text incorporates many of the changes Beckett made in the 1969 Schiller production, as well as subsequent changes in later productions. Professor Knowlson worked closely with Beckett over these revisions - and deviations from the original are noted and explained in detail.

'Malone', writes Malone, 'is what I am called now.' On his deathbed, and wiling away the time with stories, the octogenarian Malone's account of his condition is intermittent and contradictory, shifting with the vagaries of the passing days: without mellowness, without elegiacs; wittier, jauntier, and capable of wilder rages than Molloy. The sound I liked best had nothing noble about it. It was the barking of the dogs, at night, in the clusters of hovels up in the hills, where the stone-cutters lived, like generations of stone-cutters before them. it came down to me where I lay, in the house in the plain, wild and soft, at the limit of earshot, soon weary. The dogs of the valley replied with their gross bay all fangs and jaws and foam...

Coming after Charles Krance's edition of Company and of Ill Seen Ill Said (Beckett 1996), this is the third volume of Samuel Beckett's Complete Bilingual Works. Like those volumes, this one presents twin English and French texts and a complete record of the genesis of each one. This volume will serve primarily as a research tool in two areas: comparative study of Beckett's English and French texts, along with the study of the genesis of those texts.

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

Ths volume contains all of Beckett's less-than-full-length works (or 'Dramaticules') for the stage, radio and television. Arranged in chronological order of composition, these shorter plays demonstrate the laconic means and compassionate ends of Beckett's dramatic vision. Contents: All That Fall, Act Without Words, Krapp's Last Tape, Roughs for Theatre, Embers, Roughs for Radio, Words and Music, Cascando, Play, Film, The Old Tune (adapted from Pinget), 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 Traume, What Where.

This second volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett opens with the war years, when it was often impossible or too dangerous to correspond. The surge of letters beginning in 1945, and their variety, are matched by the outpouring and the range of Beckett's published work. Primarily written in French and later translated by the author, the work includes stories, a series of novels (Molloy, Malone meurt and L'Innommable), essays and plays - most notably En attendant Godot. The letters chronicle a passionately committed but little known writer evolving into a figure of international reputation, and his response to such fame. The volume provides detailed introductions which discuss Beckett's situation during the war and his crucial move into the French language, as well as translations of the letters, explanatory notes, year-by-year chronologies, profiles of correspondents and other contextual information.

Murphy, Samuel Beckett's first published novel, is set in London and Dublin, during the first decades of the Irish Republic. The title character loves Celia in a "striking case of love requited" but must first establish himself in London before his intended bride will make the journey from Ireland to join him. Beckett comically describes the various schemes that Murphy employs to stretch his meager resources and the pastimes that he uses to fill the hours of his days. Eventually Murphy lands a job as a nurse at Magdalen Mental Mercyseat hospital, where he is drawn into the mad world of the patients which ends in a fateful game of chess. While grounded in the comedy and absurdity of much of daily life, Beckett's work is also an early exploration of themes that recur throughout his entire body of work including sanity and insanity and the very meaning of life.