Echo's Bones - Softcover

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), one of the leading literary and dramatic figures of the twentieth century, was born in Foxrock, Ireland and attended Trinity College in Dublin. In 1969, Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and commended for having "transformed the destitution of man into his exaltation."

Mark Nixon is Reader in Modern Literature at the University of Reading, where he is also the Director of the Beckett International Foundation. He has published widely on Samuel Beckett’s work, and is an editor of the Journal of Beckett Studies, a member of the editorial board of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, and Co-Director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. He is the current President of the Samuel Beckett Society.

Praise for Echo's Bones

"It’s pungent early Beckett, written while he was still under the sway of his mentor, James Joyce, but with a soundscape all its own: rude, surreal, death-haunted, sex-addled, dry as bone. . . . The story’s pleasures are real, however, and reside in Beckett’s full tilt, Devil-ready language. His paragraphs unfurl like parades, notations on life’s sick pageant. . . . It’s a punk’s manifesto (Beckett was 27 when he wrote it) that gets at why Beckett continues to matter. . . . 'Echo’s Bones' returns Beckett the troublemaker." Dwight Garner, New York Times

"A fascinating glimpse at an essential author at the start of his career. . . . ['Echo’s Bones' is] exuberant, allusive, full of puns and wordplay." David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

"['Echo’s Bones'] helps us to see Beckett becoming Beckett a development of some importance in the genealogy of twentieth-century literature. . . . In this story, he is beginning to sense the path toward his own way of walking that persistent, pointless, but strangely heroic trudge through the valley of the shadow of death that will be the trajectory of his mature work. . . . [It is] picaresque and fantastical . . . vigorous and engaging." Fintan O'Toole, New York Review of Books

"We see Beckett the late-modernist offering homage to his overweening exemplar James Joyce and at the same time twisting and thrashing as he tries to fly the Joycean nets and become his own man. In the end, it is as a part of the record of this struggle that Echo’s Bones is of interest. . . . This volume is a masterpiece of scholarship." John Banville, New Statesman

"Glorious rhythms, ideas and wordplay . . . a rewarding and stimulating read for lovers of language and artistic inventiveness." Malcolm Forbes, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"An elaborate, mock-heroic fantasy that combines existentialism with elements of Dante’s Divine Comedy. . . . It is Echo’s Bones’ that shows us the things that Beckett would do so well in later decades." Arifa Akbar, The Independent

"'Echo’s Bones', with its comic brio and ostentatious learning, is a significant link between a novice intellectual and the mature author of one of the 20th century’s most celebrated plays." The Economist

"A fascinating immersion . . . sincere and gravely serious." Arts Fuse

"An extended prose poem, an exercise in beautiful language and striking image . . . this short text finds its rightful place among Beckett’s novels, plays and poems." Kirkus Reviews

"Flights of Wildean repartee alternate with a Joycean ornateness of prose. . . . ['Echo’s Bones'] contains in embryo Beckett’s whole extraordinary world of comic dread and Dürer-like imagination." Financial Times

"[In 'Echo’s Bones'] we see clear signs of the features that will blossom into Beckett’s distinct aesthetic: the existential angst and the dialogue in which neither party is making any genuine contact. Best of all, the absurdist humor, mixed with despair." The Independent

"A wonderful, mind-bending curiosity." Guardian