Dream of Fair to Middling Women: A Novel

Samuel Beckett’s first novel and “literary landmark” (St. Petersburg Times), Dream of Fair to Middling Women is a wonderfully savory introduction to the Nobel Prize–winning author. Written in the summer of 1932, when the twenty-six-year-old Beckett was poor and struggling to make ends meet, the novel offers a rare and revealing portrait of the artist as a young man. Later on, Beckett would call the novel “the chest into which I threw all my wild thoughts.” When he submitted it to several publishers, all of them found it too literary, too scandalous, or too risky; it was never published during his lifetime.

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’” (
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