'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.

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."

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.

Edited by J. C. C. Mays Murphy, Samuel Beckett's first novel, was published in 1938. Its work-shy eponymous hero, adrift in London, realises that desire can never be satisfied and withdraws from life, in search of stupor. Murphy's lovestruck fiancee Celia tries with tragic pathos to draw him back, but her attempts are doomed to failure. Murphy's friends and familiars are simulacra of Murphy, fragmented and incomplete. But Beckett's achievement lies in the brilliantly original language used to communicate this vision of isolation and misunderstanding. The combination of particularity and absurdity gives Murphy's world its painful definition, but the sheer comic energy of Beckett's prose releases characters and readers alike into exuberance.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

B+Una voz llega a alguien en la oscuridad.B; Este alguien yace boca arriba en la oscuridad, escuchando la voz que se dirige a el, a veces debilmente desde lejos, otras un murmullo al oido, la voz es B+companiaB; la mente nunca cesa de hablar, recordar, sugerir, preguntar o simplemente, repetir alguna frase ludica como una aguja atascada en el surco de un disco... Compania es el texto mas importante y mas extenso - pese a su brevedad - que Beckett escribio en sus ultimos anos.Como escribio Aldo Tagliaferri: B+La especial densidad que lo caracteriza procede de su naturaleza paradigmatica, puesto que en el reencontramos temas y tonos propios de obras anteriores. Su estructura, formada por varios segmentos de variable longitud y separados por una pausa, permite calculadas traslaciones de la anecdota parabiografica a la reflexion, del tono lirico al argumentativo, del estilema que nos recuerda los primeros pasajes narrativos beckettianos al que recuerda los ultimos.B; Compania es un paso adelante en la exploracion de lo finalmente inexplorable, en la odisea del autor descendiendo a los abismos de la imaginacion creadora. Aunque, como siempre, Beckett ilumina sus propias tinieblas con austera hilaridad.B+Una nueva novela de Beckett es una obra de arte para saborear. Es un deleite para paladear. Es suntuoso. Es estimulante. Es intensamente sensual... Un inigualable maestro del idioma ingles, el mas refinado artista verbal del siglo veinteB; (Peter Tinniswood, The Times).

Krapp's Last Tape was first performed by Patrick Magee at the Royal Court Theatre in October 1958, and described as 'a solo, if that is the word, for one voice and two organs: one human, one mechanical. It fills few pages. It is perhaps the most original and important play of its length ever written.' (Roy Walker) The present volume brings together Krapp's Last Tape and Beckett's other shorter works or 'dramaticules' written for the stage. It will be complemented by a forthcoming Faber edition of dramatic works written for radio and screen. Arranged in chronological order of composition, these shorter plays exhibit the laconic means and compassionate ends of Beckett's dramatic vision. KRAPP 'Here I end this reel. Box - [Pause.] - three, spool - [Pause.] - five. [Pause.] Perhaps my best years have gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back. [Staring motionless before him.]

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.

Fiction. "More Pricks Than Kicks", Beckett's early tragicomic masterpiece, is a collection of stories about Belacqua, a student in Dublin in the twenties, his adventures, encounters and amours, that through its original style and wry commentary succeeds in turning everyday incidents into high drama and lets us see street and university life through the observant and caustic wit of the author. Highly enjoyable to read, it delights in exuberant language and the pleasure of discovery, very typical of the young writer who in the post-war years was to astonish the world with Waiting for Godot and Molloy. First published in 1934, "More Pricks Than Kicks" is Beckett's second work of fiction. It serves as an excellent introduction to the later work of one of the most seminal and exciting major writers of the twentieth century.

This is the last of three volumes of collected shorter prose to be published in the Faber edition of the works of Samuel Beckett - which already includes a volume of early stories (The Expelled/The Calmative/The End/First Love) and of late stories (Company/Ill Seen Ill Said/Worstward Ho/Stirrings Still). The present volume contains all of the short fictions - some of them no longer than a page - written and published by Beckett between 1950 and the early 1970s. Most were written in French, and they mostly belong within three loose sequences: Texts for Nothing, Fizzles and Residua. The edition also includes two remarkable independent narratives: From an Abandoned Work and As The Story Was Told. All of these texts, whose unsleeping subject is themselves, demonstrate that the short story is one of the recurrent modes of Beckett's imagination, and occasions some of his greatest works. ... he would like it to be my fault that words fail him, of course words fail him. He tells his story every five minuts, saying it is not his, there's cleverness for you. He would like ti to be my fault that he has no story, of course he has no story, that's no reason for trying to foist one on me...

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.