“Some Other Recommended Titles”. London Review of Books, p. 17.
Samuel Beckett
-
Standard Name: Beckett, Samuel
SB
, Irish expatriate poet, short-story writer, novelist, and playwright, was a major force in international twentieth-century writing and especially theatre. He wrote a high proportion of his works in French, usually doing the translations into English himself. His increasingly death-obsessed absurdity and minimalism are combined with an invincible energy of language, even while the text appears to despair of the efficacy of words.
Connections
| Connections Sort descending | Author name | Excerpt |
|---|---|---|
| Literary responses | Sarah Kane | Meanwhile fellow-playwright Mark Ravenhill
, having initially concluded from the reviews that this was a bad play, was astonished at reading the first few lines and knowing that I was in the hands of a... |
| Literary responses | Anna Kavan | |
| Literary responses | Christine Brooke-Rose | It bore an endorsement of CBR
's work by Marina Warner
, who considered that she brilliantly fuses political engagement, Beckett
ian rhythms and experimental language as well as form. |
| Literary responses | Harold Pinter | Peter Hall
, its first director, likened the play to Mozart
's music for its precision, lyricism, and sudden descents into pain which are quickly over because of a healthy sense of the ridiculous. Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/. |
| Occupation | Nancy Cunard | Her purpose in founding the press was to publish mainly contemporary poetry of an experimental kind. Virginia Woolf
warned her that Your hands will always be covered with ink, Ford, Hugh, editor. Nancy Cunard: Brave Poet, Indomitable Rebel 1896-1965. Chilton Book Company. 69 |
| Occupation | Harold Pinter | He acted for this company for a year and learned a lot. He worked his way up in Shakespearean
roles from bit parts to major ones and discovered the writings of Samuel Beckett
. Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/. |
| Occupation | Harold Pinter | Always keen on acting, HP
played the solo protagonist of Beckett
's Krapp's Last Tape in a wheelchair at the Royal Court Upstairs
, in a run that began on 14 October 2006 (because an... |
| Author summary | Ann Quin | AQ
was one of the less-known English experimental writers of the 1960s. She has been likened to Graham Greene
, Nathalie Sarraute
, Samuel Beckett
, Robert Creeley
, Virginia Woolf
, and Anna Kavan |
| Publishing | Christine Brooke-Rose | CBR
wrote criticism and reviews since 1947, often anonymously. Between 1956 and 1968 she freelanced at literary journalism and published on a wide range of topics in diverse journals. For the London Magazine, she... |
| Publishing | Anne Carson | AC
dealt another glancing blow to conventional notions of genre in 2001 by titling her next verse novel The Beauty of the Husband. A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos. Four poems from this work... |
| Publishing | Julia Strachey | JS
also wrote creatively for the New Statesman, and was commissioned to write critically on Samuel Beckett
for The Spectator in 1957. Strachey, Julia, and Frances Partridge. Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey. Little, Brown. 189, 252 |
| Reception | Sarah Kane | A propos the Sheffield production of 2015, Alan Bennett
commented on the difficulty of achieving realism with such extreme violence: how can a character mutilated on stage be shown as having attention for anything at... |
| Residence | Edna O'Brien | Her cluttered writing room has an arbutus desk, books (many of them signed gifts from their authors), candles, paintings, the faded and fraying tapesty carpet, and images of James Joyce
and Samuel Beckett
presiding at... |
| Textual Features | Caroline Blackwood | Critic Val Warner
called CB
a unique voice in twentieth-century British fiction. Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series. Gale Research. 65: 38 |
| Textual Production | Sylvia Townsend Warner | This was one of The Dolphin Books published by Chatto and Windus
, a series including works by T. F. Powys
(The Only Penitent) and Samuel Beckett
(Proust). Warner, Sylvia Townsend. “Editorial Materials”. Sylvia Townsend Warner: Collected Poems, edited by Claire Harman, Carcanet New Press, pp. xi - xxiii; 275. 280 |
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