Collects Stan Gontarski's finest essays on the work of Samuel Beckett over a forty-year period.

Representing a profound engagement with the work of Samuel Beckett, this volume gathers the very best of Stan Gontarski's Beckett criticism on practical, theoretical and critical levels. Such a range suggests a multiplicity of approaches to a body of work itself multiple, produced by an artist who underwent any number of transformations and reinventions over his long writing career. Many of the essays collected here explore Beckett's debt to his age, Beckett very much a product of a culture in transition, which change he would help foster. But much of Beckett's creative struggle was to find a new way, his own way. Most of the essays that comprise this volume detail that struggle, toward a way we now call Beckettian.

• Includes 24 original essays divided into thematic sections: modernism, theory, editing, introducing, and performing and covers Beckett's drama, staging, fiction, poetry and prose
• Unique collection of Beckett scholarship by a leading Beckett critic and theatre director brought together for the first time
• New introductory essay reflecting on the development of Beckett scholarship