The three-act structure of Beckett's oeuvre is more obvious in his short prose than in his novels, plays or other writings. You've got the early, desperately immature Joycean stuff, represented here by four stories, the last of which A Case in a Thousand (1934) is two years later than the other three but much, much more evolved — actually rather good. Then comes the middle period, kicked off by WWII, when he wrote his name-making plays; but the first fruits of this phase are short stories, the brilliant First Love, The Expelled, The Calmative and The End. All of these center around Beckett's trademark derelict, eking his way in an uncaring world while remaining blessedly not of that world, able to exist no matter what, to find structure in arbitrariness, to construct something, meaning, from an incomprehensible nothing. I love these stories, which I had read before, and the criminally overlooked novella Mercier and Camier, as much as anything else he wrote. Truly grotesquely funny and charming. Then the late phase comes, strikingly early in the short prose with the Texts for Nothing (1950-52, when in other forms he was still writing things that made sense) — but so much of the later short prose is offcuts or abandoned stubs, this isn't surprising. It's really a jungle gym, a workout zone where Beckett puts his increasingly nonexistent characters through their tortuous, absurd paces, seeing how they might fit in a novel, on a stage, on the radio, and generally concluding that they wouldn't. Some of it, like Ping (brilliantly translated by the author from the French Bing) is aggressively anti-reader, an exercise in textual alienation that succeeds to its own detriment (and so succeeds very nicely). But some of the late shorts, like his landscape of Hell The Lost Ones, or the surprisingly lubricious Heard in the Dark 2 have sufficient coherence to land a punch on the conventional reader, which is to say I think they're (very) good. Whether they're good or not, reading them induces a feeling unlike other texts, a buzzed dissociation, an apathy that I find somehow relieving.

All I'm missing now from B is The Unnamable and How It Is. ( )

This volume sets the bar for fiction writers for the next hundred years or so. Any author thinking him/herself superior, blessed with genius, need only glance in this volume and take the measure of Sam's precise word choices, the canniness of his mind. An intimidating and awe-inspiring (and humbling) experience... ( )