When Samuel Beckett and the Dutch painter Bram Van Velde met in Paris in the 1930s, both were living in abject poverty, and neither could have anticipated that—on the other side of World War II and the brutal occupation of France by the Nazis—they would each go on to be luminaries in their respective mediums: Beckett winning the Nobel Prize and becoming a bulwark of contemporary Western literature, and Van Velde holding exhibitions all over the world. Thirty years later, a younger author at the start of his career is introduced into the company of these two great pessimists—neither of whom make cooperative interview subjects, and each of whom represents, in his own way, a radical rejection of the common languages of his art.
Rounding off the book are interviews with Beckett's chief collaborators and interpreters: among them Bert Lahr, Gogo in the first American Godot; Jack MacGowran and Billie Whitelaw, Beckett's own favorite actors; directors Mike Nichols and Deborah Warner; and Edward Beckett, his nephew and literary executor.
An atmospheric debut novel about one lost young woman’s search for another “Spellbinding. . . . Wholly engrossing.” —Washington Post Elena, struggling with memory loss due to a trauma that has unmoored her sense of self, deserts graduate school and a long-term relationship to accept a bizarre proposition from an estranged family friend in Paris: she will search for a young woman, Ella, who went missing six years earlier in Thailand, by rewriting her journals. As she delves deeper into Ella’s story, Elena begins to lose sight of her own identity and drift dangerously toward self-annihilation. Her Here is an existential detective story with a shocking denouement that plumbs the creative and destructive powers of narrative itself. An Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate and Cambridge Gates Scholar, Amanda Dennis teaches at the American University of Paris. Her Here is her first novel.
Samuel Beckett has become the standard work on the enigmatic, controversial, and Nobel Prize-winning creator of such contributions to 20th-century theater as Waiting for Godot and Endgame. 16 pages of black-and-white photographs.
Inexhaustible Beckett: even as his oeuvre continues to mark today’s literary, dramatic and other arts, the man and artist remain alive in the memories of those who knew him personally. Collected here are conversations with the author recalled by translators, scholars, artists, and theatre and media practitioners drawing on unpublished notes of meetings and uncollected (mostly) correspondence with him. Through the varied lenses of their reminiscences, readers will appreciate Beckett’s remarkable art of letter writing, his conversation punctuated by pregnant pauses, his exceptional humor and talent for friendship, and his punctilious concern for the translations, interpretations, and performance of his works. The readers of this volume will come to share the exhilaration the encounters with Beckett produced in the writers of these memoirs. Inépuisable Beckett... Non seulement son œuvre reste vivante et laisse son empreinte dans la littérature, le théâtre et les arts actuels, mais sa personnalité d’homme et d’artiste continue à marquer ceux qui l’ont connu personnellement. Ce sont les témoignages de plusieurs d’entre eux que nous reproduisons ici. A travers leurs diverses perspectives, le lecteur pourra apprécier cet art épistolaire propre à Beckett, celui de sa conversation ponctuée de silences lourds de sens, son humour exceptionnel ainsi que son talent pour l’amitié, autant que la rigueur pointilleuse qu’il apportait aux traductions, interprétations et mises en scène de ses œuvres. Nous espérons que les lecteurs de ce volume pourront partager l’enchantement ressenti par les auteurs de ces mémoires lors de leurs rencontres avec Beckett.
In prose possessed of the radically stripped-down beauty and ferocious wit that characterize his work, this early novel by Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett recounts the grotesque and improbable adventures of a fantastically logical Irish servant and his master. Watt is a beautifully executed black comedy that, at its core, is rooted in the powerful and terrifying vision that made Beckett one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.
