Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose, 1950-1976 - Softcover

Beckett, Samuel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571244629 ISBN 13: 9780571244621

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2010

Synopsis

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...

About this title

About the Author

Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin in 1906 and graduated from Trinity College. He settled in Paris in 1937, after travels in Germany and periods of residence in London and Dublin. He remained in France during the Second World War and was active in the French Resistance. From the spring of 1946 his plays, novels, short fiction, poetry and criticism were largely written in French. With the production of En attendant Godot in Paris in 1953, Beckett's work began to achieve widespread recognition. During his subsequent career as a playwright and novelist in both French and English he redefined the possibilities of prose fiction and writing for the theatre. Samuel Beckett won the Prix Formentor in 1961 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. He died in Paris in December 1989.

Edition details

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571244629
• ISBN 13: 9780571244621
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224