Books by Samuel Beckett

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?

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.]

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.

His first published work of fiction (1934), More Pricks Than Kicks is a set of ten interlocked stories, set in Dublin and involving their adrift hero Belacqua in a series of encounters, as woman after woman comes crashing through his solipsism. More Pricks contains in embryo the centrifugal world of Beckett's men and women. She lifted the lobster clear of the table. It had about thirty seconds to live. Well, thought Belacqua, it's a quick death, God help us all. It is not.

This last volume in the acclaimed edition of The Letters of Samuel Beckett covers the last twenty-four years of Beckett's life. During this time, he continued to produce major plays, won the Nobel Prize, and struggled with his increasing fame and against the privations of old age.

'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...

These four stories or 'nouvelles' date from 1945, though all were published much later, in French and subsequently in English. All make use of a first-person narrator, and relish its vagaries - the inability to remember facts, the uncertainty as to why he is speaking in the first place, the loss of heart when explanations seem called for... Above all, the stories crisply plot the narrator's plotless descent into vagrancy, the steeper as it approaches The End. Out of these short works and their patient procedures grew the large canvases of Molloy and Malone Dies.My bench was still there. It was shaped to fit the curves of the seated body. It stood beside a watering trough, gift of a Mrs Maxwell to the city horses, according to the inscription. During the short time I rested there, several horses took advantage of the monument. The iron shoes approached and the jingle of the harness. Then silence. That was the horse looking at me. Then the noise of pebbles and mud that horses make when drinking. Then the silence again. That was the horse looking at me again. Then the pebbles again. Then the silence again. Till the horse had finished drinking or the driver deemed it had drunk its fill.Edited by Christopher Ricks

This new edition brings together all of Beckett's dramatic writings for radio, television and film, offering works which range from eloquent comic naturalism to an eviscerated and pared-down symbolism. Above all, Beckett found his unique uses for the radio-play, a medium 'for voices not bodies', compacted of speech, sound and silence - and the plays in this volume intently explore the resources and limits of the sound-stage.My father, back from the dead, to be with me. (Pause.) As if he hadn't died. (Pause.) No, simply back from the dead, to be with me, in this strange place. (Pause.) Can he hear me? (Pause.) Yes, he must hear me. (Pause.) To answer me? (Pause.) No, he doesn't answer me. (Pause.) Just be with me. (Pause.) That sound you hear is the sea. (Pause. Louder.) I say that sound you hear is the sea, we are sitting on the strand. (Pause.) I mention it because the sound is so strange, so unlike the sound of the sea, that if you didn't see what it was you wouldn't know what it was. (Pause.). Hooves!Contents: All That Fall, Embers, Words and Music, Eh Joe, Quad, Film, ...but the clouds..., Ghost Trio, Nacht und Traume, Rough for Radio I, Rough for Radio II, Cascando, The Old TunePreface and Notes by Everett Frost

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

Contains all of Beckett's less-than-full-length works (or 'Dramaticules') for the stage, radio, and television. Arranged in chronological order of composition, this book presents shorter plays, which demonstrate the laconic means and compassionate ends of Beckett's dramatic vision.

Includes the novellas "First Love", "The Calamative", "The End" and "The Expelled".

Samuel Beckett claimed he couldn't talk about his work, but he proves remarkably forthcoming in these pages, which document the thirty-year working relationship between the playwright and his principal producer in the United States, Alan Schneider. The 500 letters capture the world of theater as well as the personalities of their authors.