Malone Dies is the first person monologue of Malone, an old man lying in bed and waiting to die. The tone is fiercely ironic, highly quotable, and because of its extravagance, also very comic. It catches the reality of old age in a way that is grimly convincing, cruel as humor so often is, and memorable because of Beckett's way with words. A master dramatist, Beckett's novels can be even more effective when heard, and especially when read by such a Beckett specialist as Sean Barrett.

There is now no doubt that not only is Waiting for Godot the outstanding play of the 20th century, but it is also Samuel Beckett's masterpiece. Yet it is both a popular text to be studied at school and an enigma. The scene is a country road. There is a solitary tree. It is evening. Two tramp-like figures, Vladimir and Estragon, exchange words. Pull off boots. Munch a root vegetable. Two other curious characters enter. And a boy. Time passes. It is all strange yet familiar.

The Unnamable is the third novel in Beckett's trilogy, three remarkable prose works in which men of increasingly debilitating physical circumstances act, ponder, consider and rage against impermanence and the human condition. The Unnamable is without doubt the most uncompromising text and it is read here in startling fashion by Sean Barrett.

“小説の神様”と呼ばれるきっかけともなった『小僧の神様』や『城の崎にて』など全33作品を収録

"Call me Ishmael." Thus starts the greatest American novel. Melville said himself that he wanted to write "a mighty book about a mighty theme" and so he did. It is a story of one man's obsessive revenge-journey against the white whale, Moby-Dick, who injured him in an earlier meeting. Woven into the story of the last journey of The Pequod is a mesh of philosophy, rumination, religion, history, and a mass of information about whaling through the ages.

生産様式から交換様式への移行を告げた『世界史の構造』から一〇年余，交換様式から生まれる「力」を軸に柄谷行人の全思想体系の核心を示す

This shattering drama of isolation and loss is one of the greatest tragedies in world literature. King Lear of Britain has three daughters: the hard-hearted Goneril and Regan, and the good and gentle Cordelia. He determines to divide his kingdom between them, giving the largest share to she who can say she loves him the best. Lear's tragic lack of judgment and self-knowledge is paralleled by the blindness of the loyal Gloucester who is persuaded to reject his virtuous son, Edgar, in favor of the villainous Edmund.

「古典的な西部劇の巨匠」というレッテルからジョン・フォードを解き放ち、画面そのものを見つめる快楽へとひたすら誘う――『監督 小津安二郎』と双璧をなす著者集大成。

鎌倉円覚寺の茶会で、今は亡き情人の面影をとどめるその息子、菊治と出会った太田夫人は、お互いに誘惑したとも抵抗したとも覚えはなしに夜を共にする……。志野茶碗がよびおこす感触と幻想を地模様に、一種の背徳の世界を扱いつつ、人間の愛欲の世界と名器の世界、そして死の世界とが微妙に重なりあう美の絶対境を現出した名作

By the time Shakespeare came to write Macbeth - almost certainly in 1605/1606 - he had already completed three of the great tragedies with which modern audiences are so familiar: Hamlet (1601), Othello (1603), and King Lear (1605). Each of those plays gives us an eponymous hero who is in some significant way flawed, but for whom we also inevitably feel deep sympathy, whatever his errors or crimes. But in MacBeth, Shakespeare has chosen for his tragic hero a man guilty of the most terrible crime imaginable to a Jacobean audience, that of regicide - the murder of a king.