"neither" is a very short story by Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...

 written in 1976 and originally published in the Journal of Beckett Studies

Journal of Beckett Studies

The Journal of Beckett Studies publishes academic articles relating to the work of Samuel Beckett, , the Irish poet, dramatist and playwright. Published twice yearly by Edinburgh University Press in April and September, it was established in 1976, under the editorship of John Pilling and James...

No. 4 (Spring 1979). The title is uncapitalized, and the story is composed of only eighty-seven words, divided into ten lines, and has no punctuation except for three commas.
Though originally published with line breaks suggestive of a poem, Beckett refused to include the piece in his Collected Poems because he considered it a story. As a result the work was omitted from the 1984 collection The Collected Shorter Prose 1945-1980 but later restored in The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989

The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989 (Beckett)

The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989 is a collection which includes all of Samuel Beckett's works written in prose, with the exception of his novels, novellas, and More Pricks Than Kicks which is considered "as much a novel as a collection of stories". The book was edited by S. E. Gontarski and...

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