This volume brings together three of Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett’s major short stories and thirteen shorter pieces of fiction that he calls “texts for nothing.” Here, as in all his work, Beckett relentlessly strips away all but the essential to arrive at a core of truth. His prose reveals the same mastery that marks his work from Waiting for Godot and Endgame to Molloy and Malone Dies. In each of the three stories, old men displaced or expelled from the modest corners where they have been living bestir themselves in search of new corners. Told, “You can’t stay here,” they somehow, doggedly, inevitably, go on. Includes: “The Expelled” “The Calmative” “The End” Texts for Nothing (1-10)

Characters relate in detail the experiences which shaped their personalities or reflect them vividly.

A powerful, genre-defying meditation, with Beckett at its origin, that touches on mysteries as varied as literary celebrity, baseball, and why we feel the need to be cruel to one another Following the schema of Samuel Beckett's unpublished "Long Observation of the Ray," of which only six manuscript pages exist, poet and critic Michael Coffey interleaves multiple narratives according to an arithmetic sequence laid out by Beckett in his notes. This rhythm of themes and genres--involving personal memoir, literary criticism, Beckett studies, contemporary political reportage and accounts of state-sponsored torture in appropriated texts, plus an Arabian Tale and even a baseballplay-by-play--produce a work at once sculptural, theatrical, mathematical and above all lyrical, a new form of narrative answering to a freshened rule set. In executing Beckett's most radical undertaking--one scholar referred to "Long Observation of the Ray" as a "monument to extinction"--Coffey gives readers access to an open field in which ruminations on writing mix with an engagement with Beckett scholarship as well as the unsettling chaos in today's world. Although Beckett, like any writer, had his share of abandoned works, he was in the habit of "unabandoning" on occasion. Coffey's effort here salvages a Beckett project from a half-century ago and brings it to the surface, with the contemporary markings of its hauling.

This “witty and droll” collection of philosophical tweets from the popular @NeinQuarterly offers a “perfect antidote to relentless positivity” (Publishers Weekly). “Rome didn’t burn in a day.” —Nein. A Manifesto Eric Jarosinski is the self-described “failed intellectual” behind @NeinQuarterly, a “Compendium of Utopian Negation” that uses the aphoristic potential of Twitter to plumb the existential abyss of modern life. In Nein. A Manifesto, Jarosinski collects his finest meditations on modern misery. Stridently hopeless and charmingly dour, Nein. A Manifesto is an irreverent philosophical investigation into our most—and least—urgent questions. Inspired by the aphorisms of Nietzsche, Karl Kraus, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, Jarosinski’s short-form style reinvents philosophy for a world doomed to distraction. Critical thinkers, lovers of language, bibliophiles, manics, and depressives alike will be drawn to this compelling, witty, and often hilarious translation of digital into print, theory into praxis, and tragedy into farce. [REVIEWS] “I hate Twitter, I think it should be prohibited—but Jarosinski’s Nein. is the only exception, the only reason that justifies it! He is like a radical Norman Bates from Psycho intervening with his tweets which are like fast cuts with a knife!” —Slavoj Žižek “Witty and droll . . . There are gems on nearly every page. The book might seem tongue-in-cheek, but Jarosinski’s cynical aphorisms about philosophy, art, language, and literature hold plenty of truth. It is the perfect antidote to the relentless positivity of the stereotypical self-help manual.” —Publishers Weekly “A hilarious manifesto of dystopian epigrams. Nein. is the devil on your shoulder, now on your shelf.” —Ben Schott, author of Schott’s Miscellany and Schottenfreude: German Words for the Human Condition “Nein. celebrates everything that it negates. It is quietly, joyously bleak. Will you enjoy it? Perhaps better to ask: can you be certain that you’ve ever enjoyed anything?” —MC Frontalot

This is the last of three volumes of collected shorter prose to be published in the Faber edition of the works of Samuel Beckett - which already includes a volume of early stories ( The Expelled/The Calmative/The End/First Love) and of late stories ( Company/ Ill Seen Ill Said/Worstward Ho/Stirrings Still). The present volume contains all of the short fictions - some of them no longer than a page - written and published by Beckett between 1950 and the early 1970s. Most were written in French, and they mostly belong within three loose sequences: Texts for Nothing, Fizzles and Residua. The edition also includes two remarkable independent narratives: From an Abandoned Work and As The Story Was Told. All of these texts, whose unsleeping subject is themselves, demonstrate that the short story is one of the recurrent modes of Beckett's imagination, and occasions some of his greatest works. ... he would like it to be my fault that words fail him, of course words fail him. He tells his story every five minuts, saying it is not his, there's cleverness for you. He would like ti to be my fault that he has no story, of course he has no story, that's no reason for trying to foist one on me...

Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, National Book Award in Nonfiction A New York Times Book Review “The Year in Reading” Selection All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Sympathizer comes a searching exploration of the conflict Americans call the Vietnam War and Vietnamese call the American War—a conflict that lives on in the collective memory of both nations. “[A] gorgeous, multifaceted examination of the war Americans call the Vietnam War—and which Vietnamese call the American War...As a writer, [Nguyen] brings every conceivable gift—wisdom, wit, compassion, curiosity—to the impossible yet crucial work of arriving at what he calls ‘a just memory’ of this war.” —Kate Tuttle, Los Angeles Times “In Nothing Ever Dies, his unusually thoughtful consideration of war, self-deception and forgiveness, Viet Thanh Nguyen penetrates deeply into memories of the Vietnamese war...[An] important book, which hits hard at self-serving myths.” —Jonathan Mirsky, Literary Review “Ultimately, Nguyen’s lucid, arresting, and richly sourced inquiry, in the mode of Susan Sontag and W. G. Sebald, is a call for true and just stories of war and its perpetual legacy.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

Thirteen tales are unspun from the deeply familiar, and woven anew into a collection of fairy tales that wind back through time. Acclaimed Irish author Emma Donoghue reveals heroines young and old in unexpected alliances--sometimes treacherous, sometimes erotic, but always courageous. Told with luminous voices that shimmer with sensuality and truth, these age-old characters shed their antiquated cloaks to travel a seductive new landscape, radiantly transformed.Cinderella forsakes the handsome prince and runs off with the fairy godmother; Beauty discovers the Beast behind the mask is not so very different from the face she sees in the mirror; Snow White is awakened from slumber by the bittersweet fruit of an unnamed desire. Acclaimed writer Emma Donoghue spins new tales out of old in a magical web of thirteen interconnected stories about power and transformation and choosing one's own path in the world. In these fairy tales, women young and old tell their own stories of love and hate, honor and revenge, passion and deception. Using the intricate patterns and oral rhythms of traditional fairy tales, Emma Donoghue wraps age-old characters in a dazzling new skin. 2000 List of Popular Paperbacks for YA