Contains the text to two of Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett's greatest works, a single-act play and a single-person mime sketch.

Two old tramps wait on a bare stretch of road near a tree for Godot. "This volume is an absurdist play in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for the arrival of someone named Godot. They claim he's an acquaintance but in fact hardly know him, admitting that they would not recognize him when they do see him. To occupy the time they eat, sleep, converse, argue, sing, play games, exercise, swap hats, and contemplate...

Krapp's last tape is a monologue of a man who, after 30 years, plays back the autobiographical tape he had recorded on his 39th birthday. All that fall is about the pilgrimage of an old Irish woman to meet her blind, grumbling husband at the train. In Embers, an old man and his wife ramble on and on. In Act without words I, a man responds to inviting off-stage whistles only to be thrown back from the wings. Act without words II has two men emerging...

A collection of ten short stories tracing the career of Belacqua Shuah. Belacqua--the first of Beckett's anti-heroes, a student, philanderer, and failure--studies Dante, carries on an ill-fated courtship, witnesses grotesque incidents in the streets of Dublin, attends vapid parties, endures a troubled marriage, and finally meets an accidental death. The work reveals the early stages of one of Beckett's underlying themes, bewilderment in the face of...

"In 1933, Chatto & Windus agreed to publish Samuel Beckett's More Pricks Than Kicks, a collection of ten interrelated stories, which was his first published work of fiction. At his editor's request, Beckett penned an additional story, "Echo's Bones," to serve as the final piece. However, he had already killed off several of the characters--including the protagonist, Belacqua--throughout the course of the book, and had to resurrect them from the dead....

A miscellany of criticism and a dramatic fragment.

"In Waiting for Godot, two wandering tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait by a lonely tree, to meet up with Mr. Godot, an enigmatic figure in a world where time, place and memory are blurred and meaning is where you find it. The tramps hope that Godot will change their lives for the better. Instead, two eccentric travelers arrive, one man on the end of the other's rope. The results are both funny and dangerous in this existential masterpiece. " --