Samuel Beckett

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...

"The obsessive narrator, who opens the novel asking, "Where now? Who now? When now?" is a disembodied person, living in a large jar in a restaurant window in Paris. Essentially "unnameable," the narrator is referred to as Mahood, Worm, and Basil, in a series of tales. The final sentence in the novel is a long dramatic monologue. The narrator concludes with the desire to continue living despite an inescapable sense of anguish and entropy: "I can't...

"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. " --

Two old tramps wait on a bare stretch of road near a tree for Godot. "This volume is an absurdist play in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for the arrival of someone named Godot. They claim he's an acquaintance but in fact hardly know him, admitting that they would not recognize him when they do see him. To occupy the time they eat, sleep, converse, argue, sing, play games, exercise, swap hats, and contemplate...

Contains the text to two of Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett's greatest works, a single-act play and a single-person mime sketch.

Krapp's last tape is a monologue of a man who, after 30 years, plays back the autobiographical tape he had recorded on his 39th birthday. All that fall is about the pilgrimage of an old Irish woman to meet her blind, grumbling husband at the train. In Embers, an old man and his wife ramble on and on. In Act without words I, a man responds to inviting off-stage whistles only to be thrown back from the wings. Act without words II has two men emerging...

A poor Irishman, seeking his own identity, drifts through worsening stages of despair until his final disintegration.

"In 1933, Chatto & Windus agreed to publish Samuel Beckett's More Pricks Than Kicks, a collection of ten interrelated stories, which was his first published work of fiction. At his editor's request, Beckett penned an additional story, "Echo's Bones," to serve as the final piece. However, he had already killed off several of the characters--including the protagonist, Belacqua--throughout the course of the book, and had to resurrect them from the dead....

"Two seedy stumblebums named Mercier and Camier, forerunners of Estragon and Vladimir of Waiting for Godot, set out on a mysterious journey through vaguely Irish scenery. They are unwilling clowns in a performance they do not understand ... "--From back cover, paperback edition.