Beckett
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Swinging Modern Sounds #86: Transcendentalism!
The point is not to control the medium, the point is to interact with the medium, to find out what’s natural to it and what’s native to it and work with that, respond to that.
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Remembering Jenny Diski
At n+1, philosopher and writer Justin E.H. Smith remembers Jenny Diski, and shares their correspondence. For Diski, death was always the subject, the knot to admire, wryly, and attempt to untie: …the year before her diagnosis, Jenny invokes the bleak…
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Swinging Modern Sounds #68: A Way of Life
The thing about Scott Tuma is: the immense pathos of the recordings… Almost no one, frankly, is allowed to sound this sad and continue to have a musical career.
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Behind the Scenes with Beckett
In a piece for the Times’s Sunday Book Review, Paul Muldoon leads a fascinating and warm-hearted expedition through the letters and poems of Samuel Beckett, new volumes of which will become available in the coming months. One could argue that…
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Fail Worse
If our current understanding of Beckett’s “fail better” command implies eventual success, what of failure whose endgame is really just failure? Over at Flavorwire, Jonathon Sturgeon makes a case for the value of failure itself (future success optional): When a…
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A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride
McBride has said that she wants this book to be read fast, letting it wash over you, but the struggle to make sense and to fill in the unsaid is hard to resist.
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Using French to Find English
Sixty years ago, Samuel Beckett published Waiting for Godot, a self-translated English version of his original French play, En Attendant Godot. Elizabeth Winkler writes for The Millions about how Beckett’s bilingual writing practices influenced his work and vexed scholars.
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Beckett Resurrected
Even a writer as great as Samuel Beckett faced some rejection. “Echo’s Bones,” a rejected short story from Beckett’s early days, has just been released. NPR spoke with Beckett scholar Mark Nixon to find out the story behind the story.


