Samuel Beckett Books In Order

Beckett Trilogy Books In Order

Molloy (1951)
Malone Dies (1951)
The Unnamable (1954)

Beckett Shorts Books In Order

Worstward Ho (1983)
For to End Yet Again and Other Fizzles (1976)
Beckett Shorts (1999)

Novels

Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932)
Murphy (1938)
Mercier and Camier (1946)
Watt (1953)
How It Is (1961)
Company (1980)
Ill Seen – Ill Said (1981)

Omnibus

Nohow On (1989)

Collections

More Pricks Than Kicks (1934)
Seven Plays of the Modern Theatre (1962)
Play and Two Short Pieces for Radio (1964)
Imagination Dead Imagine (1965)
Eh Joe and Other Writings (1967)
A Samuel Beckett Reader (1967)
Lessness (1970)
Breath and Other Short Plays (1971)
The Lost Ones (1972)
First Love (1973)
Texts for Nothing (1974)
Signature Anthology (1975)
Odds and Ends (1976)
Fizzles (1976)
Ends and Odds (1977)
Four Novellas (1977)
Collected Works of Samuel Beckett (1978)
Six Residua (1978)
All Strange Away (1979)
The Expelled (1980)
Rockaby (1981)
Three Occasional Pieces (1982)
Collected Shorter Plays (1984)
Collected Shorter Prose, 1945-1989 (1984)
Complete Dramatic Works (1986)
Stirrings Still (1988)
Stories and Texts for Nothing (1988)
Teleplays (1988)
I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On (1992)
Waiting for Godot / Endgame (1992)
No Author Better Served (1998)
The Shorter Plays (1999)
Three Plays (2000)

Plays

Waiting for Godot (1953)
All That Fall (1957)
Endgame (1958)
Krapp’s Last Tape (1959)
Come and Go (1966)
Happy Days (1966)
Film (1967)
Not I (1973)
That Time (1976)
Footfalls (1976)
Eleutheria (1995)

Novellas

Echo’s Bones (2014)
Dante and the Lobster (2019)

Anthologies edited

Mexican Poetry (1989)

Non fiction

Proust (1958)
Examination of James Joyce (1982)
Disjecta (1983)
Arikha (1986)
Jack B. Yeats (1991)
The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: Krapp’s Last Tape v. 1 (1992)
The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: Endgame v. 2 (1992)
Samuel Beckett’s Production Notebook: Waiting for Godot: 001 (1993)
The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot v. 3 (1994)
The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: Shorter Plays v. 4 (1999)
Texts for Nothing and Other Shorter Prose, 1950-1976 (2010)
The Poems, Short Fiction, and Criticism of Samuel Beckett (2010)
The Selected Works of Samuel Beckett (2011)

Beckett Trilogy Book Covers

Beckett Shorts Book Covers

Novels Book Covers

Omnibus Book Covers

Nohow On
(1989)

Collections Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Novellas Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Mexican Poetry
(1989)

Non fiction Book Covers

Samuel Beckett Books Overview

Molloy

Molloy, the first of the three masterpieces which constitute Samuel Beckett’s famous trilogy, appeared in French in 1951, followed seven months later by Malone Dies Malone meurt and two years later by The Unnamable L Innommable. Few works of contemporary literature have been so universally acclaimed as central to their time and to our understanding of the human experience.

Malone Dies

This is the second in the famous trilogy of novels written by Samuel Beckett in the late 1940s. An old man is dying in a room. His bowl of soup comes, his pots are emptied. He waits to die. And while he waits, he constructs stories, mainly to pass the time. Saposcat, the Lambert family, Macmann and his nurse Moll. Other figures weave in and out of his vision and his imagination. This remarkable soliloquy, so intrinsically Beckettian, is as important as Waiting for Godot or Endgame, the famous plays that made his name. Sean Barrett gives a masterly performance.

The Unnamable

The Unnamable is the third novel in Becket’s trilogy, three remarkable prose works in which men of increasingly debilitating physical circumstances act, ponder, consider and rage against impermanence and the human condition. The Unnamable is without doubt the most uncompromising text and it is read here in startling fashion by Sean Barrett. Unabridged.

Beckett Shorts

This new collection brings together ‘First Love’, ‘The Calamative’, ‘The End’ and ‘The Expelled’; these four novellas are among the first major works of Beckett’s decision to use French as his language of literary composition. Rich in verbal and situational humour, they offer a fascinating insight into many of the issues which preoccupied Beckett all his working life. As the first novella reveals, nobody writes with quite such cruel and unnervingly clever wit as Beckett…

Dream of Fair to Middling Women

Samuel Beckett’s ‘high energy and boisterously libidinous’ Booklist first novel a wonderfully savory introduction to the Nobel Prize winning author during this centenary year. Written in the summer of 1932, when the 26 year old Beckett was poor and struggling, Dream of Fair to Middling Women offers a rare and revealing portrait of the artist as a young man. Later on, Beckett would call the novel ‘the chest into which I threw all my wild thoughts.’ When he submitted it to several publishers, all of them found it too literary, too scandalous, or too risky, and it was never published during his lifetime. In the novel, Belacqua a young version of Molloy, whose love is divided between two women, Smeraldina Rima and the Alba ‘wrestles with his lusts and learning across vocabularies and continents, before a final relapse into Dublin” The New Yorker. Youthfully exuberant and visibly influenced by Joyce, Dream of Fair to Middling Women is a work of extraordinary virtuosity. Beckett delights in the wordplay and sheer joy of language that mark his later work. Above all, the story brims with the black humor that, like brief stabs of sunlight, pierces the darkness of his vision.

Murphy

Murphy, Samuel Beckett’s first published novel, is set in London and Dublin, during the first decades of the Irish Republic. The title character loves Celia in a striking case of love requited but must first establish himself in London before his intended bride will make the journey from Ireland to join him. Beckett comically describes the various schemes that Murphy employs to stretch his meager resources and the pastimes that he uses to fill the hours of his days. Eventually Murphy lands a job as a nurse at Magdalen Mental Mercyseat hospital, where he is drawn into the mad world of the patients which ends in a fateful game of chess. While grounded in the comedy and absurdity of much of daily life, Beckett s work is also an early exploration of themes that recur throughout his entire body of work including sanity and insanity and the very meaning of life.

Mercier and Camier

One of the most accessible examples of Samuel Beckett’s dark humor, Mercier and Camier is the hilarious chronicle of its two heroes epic journey. While their travels are fraught with complications and intrigue, Mercier and Camier at least did not remove from home, they had that good fortune.

Watt

Written in Roussillon during World War Two, while Samuel Beckett was hiding from the Gestapo, ‘Watt’ was first published in 1953. Beckett acknowledged that this comic novel unlike any other ‘has its place in the series’ those masterpieces running from ‘Murphy’ to the Trilogy, ‘Waiting for Godot’ and beyond. It shares their sense of a world in crisis, their profound awareness of the paradoxes of being, and their distrust of the rational universe. ‘Watt’ tells the tale of Mr Knott’s servant and his attempts to get to know his master. Watt’s mistake is to derive the essence of his master from the accidentals of his being, and his painstakingly logical attempts to ‘know’ ultimately consign him to the asylum. Itself a critique of error, Watt has previously appeared in editions that are littered with mistakes, both major and minor. The new Faber edition offers for the first time a corrected text based on a scholarly appraisal of the manuscripts and textual history.

How It Is

It is one thing to be informed by Shakespeare that life is a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing ; it is something else to encounter the idea literally presented in a novel by Samuel Beckett. But I am reasonably certain that a sensitive reader who journeys through How It Is will leave the book convinced that Beckett says more that is relevant to experience in our time than Shakespeare does in Macbeth. It should come as no surprise if a decade or so hence How It Is is appraised as a masterpiece of modern literature. This poetic novel is Beckett at his height. Webster Schott A wonderful book, written in the sparest prose…
. Beckett is one of the rare creative minds in our times. Alan Pryce Jones What is novel is the absolute sureness of design…
built phrase by phrase into a beautifully and tightly wrought structure a few dozen expressions permuted with deliberate redundancy accumulate meaning even as they are emptied of it, and offer themselves as points of radiation in a strange web of utter illusion. Hugh Kenner

Nohow On

Now compiled in one volume, these three novels, which are among the most beautiful and disquieting of Samuel Beckett’s later prose works, work together with the powerful resonance of his famous Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. In Company, a voice comes to ‘one on his back in the dark’ and speaks to him. Ill Seen Ill Said focuses attention on an old woman in a cabin who is part of the objects, landscape, rhythms, and movements of an incomprehensible universe. And in Worstward Ho, Beckett explores a tentative, uncertain existence in a world devoid of rational meaning and purpose. Here is language pared down to its most expressive, confirming Beckett’s position as one of the great writers of our time.

More Pricks Than Kicks

Samuel Beckett, the recipient of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature and one of the greatest writers of our century, first published these ten short stories in 1934; they originally formed part of an unfinished novel. They trace the career of the first of Beckett’s antiheroes, Belacqua Shuah.

First Love

This new collection brings together ‘First Love‘, ‘The Calamative’, ‘The End’ and ‘The Expelled’; these four novellas are among the first major works of Beckett’s decision to use French as his language of literary composition. Rich in verbal and situational humour, they offer a fascinating insight into many of the issues which preoccupied Beckett all his working life. As the first novella reveals, nobody writes with quite such cruel and unnervingly clever wit as Beckett…

Ends and Odds

Ends and Odds brings together nine short dramatic works by the Nobel Prize winning author of Waiting for Godot.

Rockaby

We find in Beckett’s masterful, exquisite prose, the familiar themes from his earlier works here expressed in the anguished murmurings of the solitary human consciousness.

Collected Shorter Plays

Samuel Beckett, the great minimalist master and winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature, produced some of his most widely praised work for the stage in the form of the short play. This complete and definitive collection of twenty five plays and playlets includes Beckett’s celebrated Krapp s Last Tape, Embers, Cascando, Play, Eh Joe, Not I, and Footfalls, as well as his mimes, all his radio and television plays, his screenplay for Film, his adaptation of Robert Pinget s The Old Tune, and the more recent Catastrophe, What Where, Quad, and Night and Dreams.

Complete Dramatic Works

Gathers all of Beckett’s texts for theatre, from 1955 to 1984. This book includes both the major dramatic works and the short and more compressed texts for the stage, as well for radio.

Stirrings Still

A dense interior monologue, Stirrings Still was written by Beckett in 1987 and 1988, when he had become increasingly reflective about his life. It portrays, in Beckett’s spare style, a ‘consciousness’ exploring a ‘self,’ faced with uncertainties about its own existence. Stirrings Still is a spellbinding work, full of a sense of farewell. Originally published in collaboration with John Calder in a limited edition of 226 copies numbered one to two hundred and lettered A to Z, the colume was dedicated to Beckett’s longtime friend and publisher Barney Rosset.

I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On

Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature and acknowledged as one of the greatest writers of our time, Samuel Beckett has had a profound impact upon the literary landscape of the twentieth century. In this one volume collection of his fiction, drama, poetry, and critical writings, we get an unsurpassed look at his work. Included, among others, are: The complete plays Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, Cascando, Eh Joe, Not I, and That Time Selections from his novels Murphy, Watt, Mercier and Camier, Molloy, and The Unnamable The shorter works Dante and the Lobster, The Expelled, Imagination Dead Imagine, and Lessness A selection of Beckett s poetry and critical writingsWith an indispensable introduction by editor and Beckett intimate Richard Seaver, and featuring a useful select bibliography, I Can t Go On, I ll Go On is indeed an invaluable introduction to a writer who has changed the face of modern literature.

No Author Better Served

For Alan Schneider, directing Endgame, Samuel Beckett lays out the play’s philosophy, then adds: ‘Don’t mention any of this to your actors!’ He claimed he couldn’t talk about his work, but Beckett proves remarkably forthcoming in these pages, which document the thirty year working relationship between the playwright and his principal producer in the United States. The correspondence between Beckett and Schneider offers an unparalleled picture of the art and craft of theater in the hands of two masters. It is also an endlessly enlightening look into the playwright’s ideas and methods, his remarks a virtual crib sheet for his brilliant, eccentric plays. Alan Schneider premiered five of Beckett’s plays in the United States, including Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape,and Endgame, and directed a number of revivals. Preparing for each new production, the two wrote extensive letters about intended tone, conception of characters, irony and verbal echoes, staging details for scenes, delivery of individual lines. From such details a remarkable sense of the playwright’s vision emerges, as well as a feel for the director’s task. Of Godot, Beckett wrote to Schneider, ‘I feel my monster is in safe keeping.’ His confidence in the director, and Schneider’s persistent probing for a surer understanding of each play, have produced a marvelous resource: a detailed map of Beckett’s work in conception and in production. The correspondence starts in December 1955, shortly after their first meeting, and continues to Schneider’s accidental death in March 1984 when crossing a street to mail a letter to Beckett. The 500 letters capture the world of theater as well as the personalities of their authors. Maurice Harmon’s thorough notes provide a helpful guide to people and events mentioned throughout. 20010120

The Shorter Plays

Shorter Plays follows Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Krapp’s Last Tape in this highly praised series of Beckett’s notebooks, which show for the first time the extensive revisions made by Beckett during revivals of his plays. From the mid 1960s, Samuel Beckett himself directed all his major plays in Berlin, Paris or London. For most of these productions he meticulously prepared notebooks for his personal use. The Theatrical Notebooks of Beckett that are reproduced in facsimile here offer a remarkable record of his own involvement with the staging of his texts. They present his solutions to practical problems of staging but also provide a unique insight into his way of envisaging his own plays. With additional information taken from Beckett’s own annotated and corrected copies, S.E. Gontarski has also been able to constitute a revised text for each of the plays. This new text contains Beckett’s many changes, corrections, additions and cuts. This volume includes the complete and definitive texts for such plays as Embers, Cascando, Play, Eh Joe, Not I, and Footfalls, as well as his mimes, radio and television plays. The other volumes in this series are Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Waiting for Godot.

Waiting for Godot

‘Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful?’ Estragon’s complaint, uttered in the first act of ‘Waiting for Godot‘, is the playwright’s sly joke at the expense of his own play or rather at the expense of those in the audience who expect theatre always to consist of events progressing in an apparently purposeful and logical manner towards a decisive climax. In those terms, ‘Waiting for Godot‘ which has been famously described as a play in which ‘nothing happens, twice’ scarcely seems recognizable as theatre at all. As the great English critic wrote ‘Waiting for Godot jettisons everything by which we recognize theatre. It arrives at the custom house, as it were, with no luggage, no passport, and nothing to declare; yet it gets through, as might a pilgrim from Mars.’ Produced at the state of the art recording studios of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation with sound effects and music. Performed by James Blendick, Joe Dinicol, Tim MacDonald, Tom McCamus, and Stephen Ouimette Music composed and performed by Don Horsburgh Approximate Duration 2 Hours

Endgame

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 of the human essence in the face of approaching death.

Krapp’s Last Tape

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.

Happy Days

Samuel Beckett directed ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ on four separate occasions, and this volume offers a facsimile of his 1969 Schiller Theater notebook. The notebook contains what is probably some of the most explicit analysis by Beckett of his own work ever revealed. The revised text incorporates many of the changes Beckett made in the 1969 Schiller production, as well as subsequent changes in later productions. Professor Knowlson worked closely with Beckett over these revisions and deviations from the original are noted and explained in detail.

Eleutheria

A young man at odds with his middle class family, refusing to take part in ‘normal’ life while accepting hand outs from his mother, is the subject of this play. Unperformed during Beckett’s lifetime, it draws on the traditions of French boulevard comedy and melodrama.

Mexican Poetry

The renowned Mexican poet and critic Octavio Paz assembled this important anthology the first of its kind in English translation with a keen sense of what is both representative and universal in Mexican Poetry. His informative introduction places the thirty five selected poets within a literary and historical context that spans four centuries 1521 1910. This accomplished translation is the work of the young Samuel Beckett, just out of Trinity College, who had been awarded a grant by UNESCO to collaborate with Paz on the project.

Disjecta

Renowned Beckett scholar Ruby Cohn has selected some of Beckett’s criticisms, reviews, letters, and other unpublished materials that shed new light on his work.

The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: Krapp’s Last Tape v. 1

The Poems, Short Fiction, and Criticism of Samuel Beckett

Edited by Paul Auster, this four volume hardcover set of Beckett’s canon has been designed by award winner Laura Lindgren. Available individually, as well as in a boxed set, these books are specially bound with covers featuring images central to Beckett’s works. Typographical errors that remained uncorrected in the various prior editions have now been corrected in consultation with Beckett scholars C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski.’ Beckett settled on philosophical comedy as the medium for his uniquely anguished, arrogant, self doubting, scrupulous temperament. In the popular mind his name is associated with the mysterious Godot who may or may not come but for whom we wait anyhow. In this he seemed to define the mood of an age. But his range is wider than that, and his achievement far greater. Beckett was an artist possessed by a vision of life without consolation or dignity or promise of grace, in the face of which our only duty is not to lie to ourselves. It was a vision to which he gave expression in language of a virile strength and intellectual subtlety that marks him as one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century.’ J. M. Coetzee, from his Introduction