Samuel Beckett's "high energy and boisterously libidinous"(Booklist) first novel--a wonderfully savory introduction to the NobelPrize-winning author during this centenary year.Written in the summer of 1932, when the 26-year-old Beckett was poor andstruggling, Dream of Fair to middling Women offers a rare and revealingportrait of the artist as a young man. Later on, Beckett would call thenovel "the chest into which I threw all my wild thoughts." When hesubmitted it to several publishers, all of them found it too literary, tooscandalous, or too risky, and it was never published during his lifetime. In the novel, Belacqua--a young version of Molloy, whose love is dividedbetween two women, Smeraldina-Rima and the Alba--"wrestles with his lustsand learning across vocabularies and continents, before a final relapseinto Dublin'" (The New Yorker). Youthfully exuberant and visibly influencedby Joyce, Dream of Fair to middling Women is a work of extraordinaryvirtuosity. Beckett delights in the wordplay and sheer joy of language thatmark his later work. Above all, the story brims with the black humor that,like brief stabs of sunlight, pierces the darkness of his vision.

薩繆爾·貝剋特（Samuel Beckett），1906年4月13日生於都柏林南郊的福剋斯羅剋，1989年12月22日逝於巴黎。僑居法國的愛爾蘭小說傢、戲劇傢、詩人，同時用英文和法文進行創作，1969年因其作品“以新的小說和戲劇的形式從現代人的窘睏中獲得崇高”而榮膺諾貝 爾文學奬。

硃雪峰，南京大學外國語學院副教授，主要研究興趣為戲劇研究、電影研究、英美文學研究。貝剋特骨灰粉。