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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Beckett Trilogy'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Brodie's Notes on Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Company'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'En Attendant Godot'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Endgame: A Play in One Act, Followed by Act Without Words, a Mime for One Player'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Expelled and Other Novellas'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Film'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'First Love'

› Find signed collectible books: 'I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Selection from Samuel Beckett's Work'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In Transition: A Paris Anthology'
A selection of the some of the best writing to appear in "transition", one of the most important literary magazines of the 1920s in Paris, which includes work by Gide, Joyce, Jung, Kafka, Miro, Picasso and Gertrude Stein. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In Transition: A Paris Anthology Writing and Art from Transition Magazine 1927-30'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Lost Ones'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Malone Dies'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Molloy'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Molloy, Malone Dies, the Unnamable'
Samuel Beckett's brilliance as a dramatist--as the creator of Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape, and that despairing pas de deux Endgame--has tended to overshadow his gifts as a novelist. Yet he's unmistakably one of the great fiction writers of our century. As a young man he took dictation (literally) from James Joyce, and absorbed everything that myopic maestro had to offer when it came to Anglo-Irish prosody. Still, Beckett's instincts would ultimately steer him away from Joyce's delirious play with high and low diction, toward a more concentrated, even compulsive style. His earlier novels, like Murphy or Watt, give us a taste of what was to come. But Beckett truly hit his stride with a trilogy of early-1950s masterpieces: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. Here he dispenses with all the customary props of contemporary fiction--including exposition, plot, and increasingly, paragraphs--and turns his attention to consciousness itself. Nobody has ever evoked the pain of existence, or the steady slide toward nonexistence, with such poetic, garrulous accuracy. And once you've attuned yourself to the epistemological vaudeville of Beckett's prose, he turns out to be the funniest writer on the planet--ever.
None of the three entries in the trilogy is exactly amenable to summary. It's fair to say, though, that Molloy is the easiest to read, with at least a bare-bones narrative and an abundance of comical set pieces. In one famous episode, the narrator spends page after page figuring out how to vary the sucking stones he carries in his pockets:
And while I gazed thus at my stones, revolving interminable martingales all equally defective, and crushing handfuls of sand, so that the sand ran through my fingers and fell back on the strand, yes, while thus I lulled my mind and part of my body, one day suddenly it dawned on the former, dimly, that I might perhaps achieve my purpose without increasing the number of my pockets, or reducing the number of my stones, but simply by sacrificing the principle of trim. The meaning of this illumination, which suddenly began to sing within me, like a verse of Isaiah, or of Jeremiah, I did not penetrate at once, and notably the word trim, which I had never met with, in this sense, long remained obscure.This nutty ratiocination goes on for much, much longer, until the narrator loses patience and throws the stones away. And that's a fair encapsulation of Beckett's philosophy: he argues for the essential pointlessness of life--the solitary, wretched splendor of human existence--but does so in a comic rather than a tragic register, which ends up softening or even overpowering the bleakness of his initial premise. So Malone Dies opens with a typically morbid mood-lifter ("I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of it all") and then makes endless comedic hay out of Malone's failure to keel over. And by the time we hit The Unnamable, we're forced to wonder whether the narrator actually exists: "I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on." Happily, Beckett worried these same questions and hypotheses to the end of his career, with increasingly minimalistic gusto. But he never topped the intensity or linguistic brilliance of this mind-bending three-part invention. --James Marcus [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'More Pricks Than Kicks'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Murphy'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Palestine: History of a Lost Nation'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Poems in English'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Samuel Beckett Reader'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot - Endgame'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Samuel Beckett, Wordmaster: Waiting for Godot Text with Critical Commentary'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Stories and Texts for Nothing'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Three Novels by Samuel Beckett'
Samuel Beckett's brilliance as a dramatist--as the creator of Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape, and that despairing pas de deux Endgame--has tended to overshadow his gifts as a novelist. Yet he's unmistakably one of the great fiction writers of our century. As a young man he took dictation (literally) from James Joyce, and absorbed everything that myopic maestro had to offer when it came to Anglo-Irish prosody. Still, Beckett's instincts would ultimately steer him away from Joyce's delirious play with high and low diction, toward a more concentrated, even compulsive style. His earlier novels, like Murphy or Watt, give us a taste of what was to come. But Beckett truly hit his stride with a trilogy of early-1950s masterpieces: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. Here he dispenses with all the customary props of contemporary fiction--including exposition, plot, and increasingly, paragraphs--and turns his attention to consciousness itself. Nobody has ever evoked the pain of existence, or the steady slide toward nonexistence, with such poetic, garrulous accuracy. And once you've attuned yourself to the epistemological vaudeville of Beckett's prose, he turns out to be the funniest writer on the planet--ever.
None of the three entries in the trilogy is exactly amenable to summary. It's fair to say, though, that Molloy is the easiest to read, with at least a bare-bones narrative and an abundance of comical set pieces. In one famous episode, the narrator spends page after page figuring out how to vary the sucking stones he carries in his pockets:
And while I gazed thus at my stones, revolving interminable martingales all equally defective, and crushing handfuls of sand, so that the sand ran through my fingers and fell back on the strand, yes, while thus I lulled my mind and part of my body, one day suddenly it dawned on the former, dimly, that I might perhaps achieve my purpose without increasing the number of my pockets, or reducing the number of my stones, but simply by sacrificing the principle of trim. The meaning of this illumination, which suddenly began to sing within me, like a verse of Isaiah, or of Jeremiah, I did not penetrate at once, and notably the word trim, which I had never met with, in this sense, long remained obscure.This nutty ratiocination goes on for much, much longer, until the narrator loses patience and throws the stones away. And that's a fair encapsulation of Beckett's philosophy: he argues for the essential pointlessness of life--the solitary, wretched splendor of human existence--but does so in a comic rather than a tragic register, which ends up softening or even overpowering the bleakness of his initial premise. So Malone Dies opens with a typically morbid mood-lifter ("I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of it all") and then makes endless comedic hay out of Malone's failure to keel over. And by the time we hit The Unnamable, we're forced to wonder whether the narrator actually exists: "I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on." Happily, Beckett worried these same questions and hypotheses to the end of his career, with increasingly minimalistic gusto. But he never topped the intensity or linguistic brilliance of this mind-bending three-part invention. --James Marcus [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Unnamable'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Waiting for Godot'
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. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Waiting for Godot and Endgame'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Watt'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'En Attendant Godot : Pièce en Deux Actes'
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