Stories and Texts for Nothing by Samuel Beckett (1955). The Nobel Prize–winning playwright’s fiction shares the elliptical, elusive qualities of his celebrated dramas Waiting for Godot and Endgame. The Stories are bitterly comic acknowledgments of sexual failure and mortality (such as the masterly “Assumption”) that clearly foreshadow the later Texts for Nothing. These thirteen nonnarrative prose pieces are fatalistic outcries uttered by moribund outcasts awaiting oblivion: the resigned, the dying, and the dead—all saved from meaninglessness by the grave, eloquent music of a measured style that redeems, even as it snatches away, their humanity.
Total Points: 3 (BM 3)