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.

• 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

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.