In 1933, Chatto & Windus agreed to publish Samuel Beckett's More Pricks Than Kicks, a collection of ten interrelated stories, which was his first published work of fiction. At his editor's request, Beckett penned an additional story, "Echo's Bones", to serve as the final piece. However, he had already killed off the protagonist, Belacqua, and had to resurrect them from the dead. Despite Beckett's efforts, the story was turned down by his editor and excluded from the collection, as it was considered too imaginatively playful, too allusive, and too undisciplined—qualities now recognized as quintessentially Beckett. As a result, "Echo's Bones" (not to be confused with the poem and collection of poems of the same title) remained unpublished—until now, eight decades later.

It begins with the antihero returned to life, sitting on the cemetery fence and smoking cigars. There, he encounters a macabre triumvirate: a prostitute; an infertile baron who requests Belacqua's assistance in securing the future of his estate; and a groundskeeper who attempts to rob Belacqua's grave. The phantasmagoric events that ensure encapsulate Beckett's burgeoning preoccupation with the tragicomedy of existence that suffuses his later writings.

In the introduction and critical notes, Mark Nixon situates this little-known text in terms of its biographical context, its textual references, its Joycean influences, and he examines how it is a vital link in the evolution of Beckett's early work. Beckett confessed that he included "all I knew" in the story, harnessing an immense range of subjects, from science and philosophy to religion and literature, combining fairy tales, gothic dreams, and classical myth. The posthumous publication of Echo's Bones marks the unexpected and highly exciting return of a literary legend.

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