"The plain reader be damned," declared the young Samuel Beckett in an essay in Transition, the Parisian journal where some of his first poetry and prose appeared. Plain readers have been grappling with Beckett's thorny, modernist work ever since. Some of the stories collected in Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 and its companion volume Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho: Three Novels seem almost approachable, while such exercises in oddity as the 13 Texts for Nothing seem more impenetrable by the day.
