Pilling, J: Samuel Beckett's 'More Pricks Than Kicks'

Acknowledgements \ Preface \ 1. The Disruptive Intelligence \ 2. My sometime friend Belacqua \ 3. How it went in the world \ 4. The Statement of a Compromise\ 5. Notesnatchings: Allusions, Borrowings and Self-Plagiarisms in More Pricks Than Kicks \ 6. Addenda \ Bibliography \ Index

John Pilling is Emeritus Professor of English and European Literature at the University of Reading, UK. He edited the Journal of Beckett Studies for ten years, serves on the editorial board of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui. and has written or edited numerous books, articles, symposia, and review essays on Beckett for more than thirty years. His special interest and expertise currently is in every aspect of Beckett's life and work in the 1930s.

It is very easy to write about indeterminacy, ambiguity, and ambivalence in Beckett, but very hard to do so with the persuasive depth of research and sensitivity to nuance that we have come to expect from John Pilling. In this fresh, revisionary study of More Pricks than Kicks, he captures a critical moment in Beckett's tortuous path to the inimitable voice of his mature art, and Pilling does so in a distinct voice of his own that makes this rigorous scholarly work a pleasure to read. -- H Porter Abbott, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA Only somebody with the deep and authoritative knowledge of early Beckett that John Pilling has could have written this book. Pilling brings to Beckett's brilliant, perverse collection of stories a steady and shrewd critical intelligence and perfect pitch for echo, allusion and overtone. This book must be regarded as an indispensable resource for anyone approaching More Pricks Than Kicks. The book that has been so long a phantom presence in Beckett's oeuvre, suffering both from Beckett's deprecation and readers' impatience, has at last been made deliciously and compellingly readable. -- Steven Connor, Professor of Modern Literature and Theory, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK Pilling's careful excavation of manuscript materials is wholly in line with the aims of this series which stress primary and archival sources as contexts for major (and minor) works of Modernism... the volume under review, will prove indispensable for future scholars of what Jean-Michel Rabate once termed 'Beckett avant Beckett'. The Beckett Circle