Gathers the Nobel Prize winning poet and dramatist's short prose into one volume that affords the reader a view of Beckett's development as an artist.

Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett was one of the most profoundly original writers of the 20th century. He gave expression to the anguish and isolation of the individual consciousness with a purity and minimalism that have altered the shape of world literature. A tremendously influential poet and dramatist, Beckett spoke of his prose fiction as the "important writing," the medium in which he distilled his ideas most powerfully. Here, for the first time, his short prose is gathered in a definitive, complete volume by leading Beckett scholar S. E. Gontarski.

The explosion of minimalism into the worlds of visual arts, music and literature in the mid-to-late twentieth century presents one of the most radical and decisive revolutions in aesthetic history. Detested by some, embraced by others, minimalism's influence was immediate, pervasive and lasting, significantly changing the way we hear music, see art and read literature. In The Theory of Minimalism, Marc Botha offers the first general theory of minimalism, equally applicable to literature, the visual arts and music. He argues that minimalism establishes an aesthetic paradigm for rethinking realism in genuinely radical terms. In dialogue with thinkers from both the analytic and continental traditions – including Kant, Danto, Agamben, Badiou and Meillassoux – Botha develops a constellation of concepts which together encapsulate the transhistorcial and transdisciplinary reach of minimalism. Illustrated by a range of historical, canonical and contemporary minimalist works of different media, from the caves of early Christian ascetics to Samuel Beckett's late prose, Botha offers a bold and provocative argument which will equip readers with the tools to engage critically with past, present and future minimalism, and to recognize how, in a culture caught between the poles of excess and austerity, minimalism still matters.

"A fascination with childhood unites the artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) and the writers Samuel Beckett (1906-89) and Marcel Proust (1871-1922). But while many commentators have traced their childhood images back to memories of lived experiences, there is more to their mythologies of childhood that waits to be explored. They invite us to move away from familiar ideas - whether psychological or biographical - about what a child can represent, and even what a child is. The haunting child figures of Bourgeois, Beckett and Proust echo each other as they show how imagining origins- for a life, for a work of art - involves paradoxes that test the limits of our forms of expression. Art meets literature, profusion meets concision, French meets English, and images of childhood reveal new insights in this encounter between three great figures of twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. Catherine Crimp holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and is currently Lectrice d'anglais at theEcole Normale Superieure de Lyon."

Samuel Beckett produced some of the most powerful writing – some of the funniest but most devastating – of the twentieth century. He described his plays, prose and poetry as ‘an unnecessary stain on the silence’, but the extraordinary combination of concision and richness in his writing stems from his peculiar sensitivity to the sounds and rhythms of words. Moreover, music forms a part of Beckett’s comic aesthetics of failure: it plays a role in his exploration of the possibilities and failures of the imagination, and the ever-failing attempt to forge a sense of self. No wonder, then, that so many composers have taken inspiration from Beckett, setting his words to music or translating into music the dramatic themes or contexts of his work. Headaches Among the Overtones considers both music in Beckett and Beckett’s significance in contemporary music. In doing so, it explores the relationship between words, music and meaning, examining how comparable philosophical concerns and artistic effects appear in literature and music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Addressing their shared passion for literature, art, and music, this book documents how Samuel Beckett and David Bowie produce extraordinarily empathetic creative outputs that reflect the experience and the effect of alienation. Through an exploration of their artistic practices, the study also illustrates how both artists articulate shared forms of human experience otherwise silenced by normative modes of representation. To liberate these experiences, Bowie and Beckett create alternative theatrical, musical, and philosophical spaces, which help frame the power relations of the psychological, verbal, and material places we inhabit. The result is that their work demonstrates how individuals are disciplined by the implicitly repressive social order of late capitalism, while, simultaneously, offering an informed political alternative. In making the injunctions of the social order apparent, Beckett and Bowie also transgress its terms, opening up new spaces beyond the conventional identities of family, nation, and gender, until both artists finally coalesce in the quantum space of the posthuman.

The Reader makes readily available for the first time 17 major, previously uncollected significant essays from the Journal of Beckett Studies from 1992 to the present.

For the first time in scholarship, this essay collection interprets modernity through the literary micro-genres of the aphorism, the epigram, the maxim, and the fragment. Situating Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde as forerunners of modern aphoristic culture, the collection analyses the relationship between aphoristic consciousness and literary modernism in the expanded purview of the long twentieth century, through the work of a wide range of authors, including Samuel Beckett, Max Beerbohm, Jorge Luis Borges, Katherine Mansfield, and Stevie Smith. From the romantic fragment to the tweet, Aphoristic Modernity offers a compelling exploration of the short form's pervasive presence both as a standalone artefact and as part of a larger textual and cultural matrix.

This book focuses on literal and metaphorical ruins, as they are appropriated and imagined in different forms of writing. Examining British and American literature and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book begins in the era of industrial modernity with studies of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and Daphne Du Maurier. It then moves on to the significance of ruins in the twentieth century, against the backdrop of conflict, waste and destruction, analyzing authors such as Beckett and Pinter, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Leonard Cohen. The collection concludes with current debates on ruins, through discussions of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, as well as reflections on the refugee crisis that take the ruin beyond the text, offering new perspectives on its diverse legacies and conceptual resources.