The iconic trilogy of novels by the era-defining Nobel laureate, relaunched for a new generation. 'The master innovator of them all.' Guardian I can't go on, I'll go on. Molloy: a sordid vagrant riding his bicycle through the countryside, sucking stones, on a quest for his mother. Moran: a private detective sent on his trail, investigating his crimes - but soon to deteriorate alongside him. Malone: an octogenarian man on his deathbed, naked in piles of blankets, wiling away the time with stories - writing, reminiscing, raging, surviving. The Unnameable: an armless and legless creature from a nameless place, weeping and watching in his urn, orbited by visitors outside a chop-house. Together, these selves speak, debate, exist: the prose as alive, or more, than them.

The iconic trilogy of novels by the Nobel Prize-winning legend, relaunched for a new generation. 'The master innovator of them all.' Guardian I can't go on, I'll go on. Molloy: a sordid vagrant riding his bicycle through the countryside, sucking stones, on a quest for his mother. Moran: a private detective sent on his trail, investigating his crimes - but soon to deteriorate alongside him. Malone: an octogenarian man on his deathbed, naked in piles of blankets, wiling away the time with stories - writing, reminiscing, raging, surviving. The Unnameable: an armless and legless creature from a nameless place, weeping and watching in his urn, orbited by visitors outside a chop-house. Together, these selves speak, debate, exist - the prose as alive, or more, than them.

'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 iconic trilogy of novels by the era-defining Nobel laureate, relaunched for a new generation. 'The master innovator of them all.' Guardian I can't go on, I'll go on. Molloy: a sordid vagrant riding his bicycle through the countryside, sucking stones, on a quest for his mother. Moran: a private detective sent on his trail, investigating his crimes - but soon to deteriorate alongside him. Malone: an octogenarian man on his deathbed, naked in piles of blankets, wiling away the time with stories - writing, reminiscing, raging, surviving. The Unnameable: an armless and legless creature from a nameless place, weeping and watching in his urn, orbited by visitors outside a chop-house. Together, these selves speak, debate, exist - the prose as alive, or more, than them.

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."

Samuel Beckett is the greatest Irish novelist of the later twentieth century, and this trilogy of novels is his masterpiece -which makes it perhaps the outstanding literary work of our time. Because Beckett has a reputation for being difficult, even obscure, readers of the trilogy are bound to be struck not only by the verbal brilliance and inventiveness of the three novels, but also by their extraordinary humour which ranges from wit to broad comedy and even farce in a recognizably Irish way. Each story records an episode of human endurance in the face of metaphysical adversity with compassion and wisdom and each is a compelling narrative in itself in the great tradition of European fiction from Flaubert to Joyce.

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.

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.

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.

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

'They didn't seem to take much interest in my private parts which to tell the truth were nothing to write home about, I didn't take much interest in them myself.' From the master of the absurd, these two stories of an unnamed vagrant contending with decay and death combine bleakness with the blackest of humour. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

This collection of Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett's dramatic pieces includes a short stage play, two radio plays, and two pantomimes. The stage play"Krapp's Last Tape"evolves a shattering drama out of a monologue of a man who, at age sixty-nine, plays back the autobiographical tape he recorded on his thirty-ninth birthday.
The two radio plays were commissioned by the BBC;"All That Fall""plumbs the same pessimistic depths [as"Waiting for Godot"] in what seems a no less despairing search for human dignity" (London"Times"), and"Embers"is equally unforgettable theater, born of the ramblings of an old man and his wife. Finally, in the two pantomimes, Beckett takes drama to the point of pure abstraction with his portrayals of, in"Act Without Words I," frustrated desired, and in"Act Without Words I," corresponding motions of living juxtaposed in the slow despair of one man and the senselessly busy motion of another.

'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...

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.

Mercier and Camier, Beckett's first postwar novel and his first in French, has been described as a forerunner of his most famous work, Waiting for Godot. Like the play, Mercier and Camier revolves around two wandering vagabonds. Their journey is described as relatively easy going, with no frontiers or seas to be crossed. The reader never knows where the journey starts or where it ends and the novel is less about the characters' physical progress than their exchanges regarding the meaning of their journey, their goals, and life in general. One of Beckett's more accessible works, Mercier and Camier is one of his early endeavors to experiment with structure and reimagine the novel as it had been known.

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.

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.

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.

" 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 renowned Mexican poet and critic Octavio Paz assembled this important anthology--the first of its kind in English translation--with a keen sense of what is both representative and universal in Mexican poetry. His informative introduction places the thirty-five selected poets within a literary and historical context that spans four centuries (1521-1910). This accomplished translation is the work of the young Samuel Beckett, just out of Trinity College, who had been awarded a grant by UNESCO to collaborate with Paz on the project.
Notable among the writers who appear in this anthology are Bernardo de Balbuena (1561-1627), a master of the baroque period who celebrated the exuberant atmosphere and wealth of the New World; Juan Ruiz de Alarcon (1581?-1639), who became one of Spain's great playwrights; and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1651-1695), the beautiful nun whose passionate lyric poetry, written within her convent's walls, has made her, three hundred years later, a proto-feminist literary heroine.
This is a major collection of Mexican poetry from its beginnings until the modern period, compiled and translated by two giants of world literature.

Ends and Odds brings together nine short dramatic works by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Waiting for Godot.

One of the most important playwrights and novelists of the twentieth century, Samuel Beckett was also an accomplished poet and translator. Collected Poems in English and French is a complete collection of all the poetry by the Nobel Prize-winning writer, including his poetry written originally in English and French, as well as his translations of major French poets such as Paul Eluard, Arthur Rimbaud, and Guillaume Appollinaire. The English poems include Whoroscope, his first published verse, as well as the thirteen poems first published in 1935 as Echo's Bones and Other Preipitates. In addition, there are the dozen poems in French that Beckett wrote in 1938 and 1939, his first creative work in that language; three of these are accompanied by Beckett's own English translations. Among the translations are those of eight Eluard poems, The Drunken Boat by Rimbaud, Zone by Apollinaire, and nine maxims by Chamfort. From his original work to his translations, Beckett's genius and masterful use of language are on display throughout this collection.

Samuel Beckett, the recipient of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature and one of the greatest writers of our century, first published these ten short stories in 1934; they originally formed part of an unfinished novel. They trace the career of the first of Beckett's antiheroes, Belacqua Shuah.
Belacqua is a student, a philanderer, and a failure, and Beckett portrays the various aspects of his troubled existence: he studies Dante, attempts an ill-fated courtship, witnesses grotesque incidents in the streets of Dublin, attends vapid parties, endures his marriage, and meets his accidental death. These early stories point to the qualities of precision, restraint, satire, and poetry found in Beckett's mature works, and reveal the beginning stages of Beckett's underlying theme of bewilderment in the face of suffering.

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.