With original and informative intertextual reading of Beckett's work, detecting previously unknown quotations, allusions to and parodies of Dante, Daniela Caselli presents a study of the relationship between Beckett and Dante.

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. Well, thought Belacqua, it's a quick death, God help us all.It is not.'Dante and the Lobster' is the first of the linked short stories in Samuel Beckett's first book, More Pricks Than Kicks. Published in 1934, its style was recognisably indebted to that of his mentor, James Joyce, and crammed with linguistic texture and allusion that Beckett later shed. The book baffled many critics and sold so few copies that several batches were pulped.Decades later, this story was hailed as the Nobel Prize-winner's earliest important work.

Field Work is the record of four years during which Seamus Heaney left the violence of Belfast to settle in a country cottage with his family in Glanmore, County Wicklow. Heeding "an early warning system to get back inside my own head," Heaney wrote poems with a new strength and maturity, moving from the political concerns of his landmark volume North to a more personal, contemplative approach to the world and to his own writing. In Field Work he "brings a meditative music to bear upon fundamental themes of person and place, the mutuality of ourselves and the world" (Denis Donoghue, The New York Times Book Review).

Samuel Beckett, the recipient of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature and one of the greatest writers of our century, first published these ten short stories in 1934; they originally formed part of an unfinished novel. They trace the career of the first of Beckett’s antiheroes, Belacqua Shuah. Belacqua is a student, a philanderer, and a failure, and Beckett portrays the various aspects of his troubled existence: he studies Dante, attempts an ill-fated courtship, witnesses grotesque incidents in the streets of Dublin, attends vapid parties, endures his marriage, and meets his accidental death. These early stories point to the qualities of precision, restraint, satire, and poetry found in Beckett’s mature works, and reveal the beginning stages of Beckett’s underlying theme of bewilderment in the face of suffering.

Well, thought Belacqua, it's a quick death, God help us all. It is not. "Dante and the Lobster" is the first of the linked short stories in Samuel Beckett's first book, More Pricks Than Kicks. Published in 1934, its style was recognisably indebted to that of his mentor, James Joyce, and crammed with linguistic texture and allusion that Beckett later shed. The book baffled many critics and sold so few copies that several batches were pulped. Decades later, this story was hailed as the Nobel Prize-winner's earliest important work.

Beckett's first 'literary landmark' ( St Petersburg Times) is a wonderfully savoury introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning author. Written in 1932, when the twenty-six-year-old Beckett was struggling to make ends meet, the novel offers a rare and revealing portrait of the artist as a young man. When submitted to several publishers, all of them found it too literary, too scandalous or too risky; it was only published posthumously in 1992. As the story begins, Belacqua - a young version of Molloy, whose love is divided between two women, Smeraldina-Rima and the little Alba - 'wrestles with his lusts and learning across vocabularies and continents, before a final "relapse into Dublin"' ( New Yorker). Youthfully exuberant and Joycean in tone, Dream is a work of extraordinary virtuosity.