In a series of acute formalist encounters, Samuel Beckett's Lyric Failure examines how ending, exhaustion, and failure manifest in Beckett's poetry. Working beyond the familiar paradox of failure / going on, failure is shown to be the ground and possibility of Beckett's poetry, opening to an alternative futurity.

Mark Byron, Professor of Modern Literature, University of Sydney, Australia

Beckett's famous injunction, “Fail better”, has been so successful that it is now a universal catchphrase. Mantra Mukim's excellent study applies this paradoxical art of failure to Beckett's poetry by rewriting it as “Fail to the letter”. His original move discloses a new grammar of the lyrical voice while deploying a whole grammatology of the Beckettian sublime.

Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania, American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, USA