While short fiction was a major creative outlet for Samuel Beckett, it has attracted only a modest readership. Such neglect is difficult to account for given that Beckett wrote short fiction for the entirety of his creative life, and his literary achievement and innovation are as apparent in the shorter works as in his more famous novels and plays, if succinctly so. Christopher Ricks, for one, has suggested that the 1946 short story ‘The End’ is, ‘the best possible introduction to Beckett's fiction’ (1967: 148–9). Yet few anthologists of short fiction, and in particular of the Irish short story, include Beckett's work. Beckett's stories have instead often been treated as anomalous or aberrant, a species so alien to the tradition of short fiction that critics are still struggling to assess not only what they mean – if indeed they ‘mean’ at all – but what they are: stories or novels, prose or poetry, rejected fragments or completed tales. William Trevor has justified Beckett's exclusion from The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories by asserting that, like his countrymen Shaw and O'Casey, Beckett ‘conveyed [his] ideas more skilfully in another medium’ (Trevor 1989: xvi). But to see Beckett as fundamentally a dramatist who wrote some narratives is seriously to distort his literary achievement. Beckett himself considered his prose fictions ‘the important writing’ (Lake 1984: 133). Such omissions are all the more curious given that Beckett's short prose approaches Trevor's characterisation of the genre as ‘the distillation of an essence’. Beckett's prose pieces are the product of some sixty years of expulsion and distillation, of excising excess and extraneity, and through that process novels were often reduced to stories, stories pared to fragments, first abandoned then unabandoned and ‘completed’, if that is the word, through the act of publication.