Samuel Beckett - The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989

Samuel Beckett - The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 (Grove Press, 1995). Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Stanley E. Gontarski.

ISBN: 9780802134905 | 336 pages | EPUB

Although Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) is best-known for his novels and plays, he is rarely thought of as a writer of short fiction and prose. Yet he wrote short works devotedly throughout his life, and Beckett spoke of his prose fiction as the "important writing," the medium in which he distilled his ideas most powerfully. Many critics count various Beckett short stories as masterpieces of the form, central to an appreciation of the writer's oeuvre.

THE COMPLETE SHORT PROSE collects all these shorter works -- such as "First Love" (1946), "Texts for Nothing" (1950-1952), and "The Lost Ones" (1966) -- in a definitive, complete volume by leading Beckett scholar Stanley Gontarski. Taken together, Beckett's short prose pieces not only outline his development as an artist, but suggest as well his own view of his art, that it is all part of a continuous process, a series.


Reviews

"Beckett's prose, most especially his stories, historically have taken a back seat to his theatrical works and poetry. The works in this collection, eloquent distillations of the writer's ideas, clearly demonstrate how unfortunate this oversight has been." -- Library Journal

"This illuminating new collection of prose [does] a remarkably succinct job of charting Beckett's philosophical evolution." -- The New York Times

"One of the most fascinating components of this book is the 'Notes on the Texts' which give the full history of each, chronologically all the way from his first short story, 'Assumption,' to the last of 'Stirrings Still.' . . . The scholarly and bibliographical apparatus provided are truly useful and texts have been corrected from numerous erroneous versions." -- The Boston Phoenix