February 1, 2017

Coverage of Lois Oppenheim’s “Dear Mr. Beckett”

A new release by Lois Oppeheim, professor of French and chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, is getting wide coverage from outlets such as: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Newsday, The Times Literary Supplement (TLS-London), the Minneapolis StarTribune, The Buffalo News, AMFM Magazine, and elsewhere.

Oppenheim is the editor of Dear Mr. Beckett – Letters from the Publisher: The Samuel Beckett File by Barney Rosset (1922 – 2012) and published by Opus Books.

The book includes much material shared between Rosset, the avant-garde publisher of Grove Press, and Beckett, the Dublin-born novelist, poet, director, and writer of plays including Waiting for Godot.

Beckett was living in Paris and publishing in French when Rosset became his American publisher and virtually introduced Beckett to the English-speaking world in the 1950s. They were two men who “revolutionized the world of literature,” writes Oppenheim.

With nearly 500 pages of previously unpublished transatlantic correspondence, unpublished interviews, photos, correspondence with others, and doodles (both Rosset and Beckett were doodlers), the book “is a valuable memento of the long enduring friendship and respect that they held for each other, as well as a tribute to the extraordinary achievements of Barney Rosset,” writes Oppenheim in the book’s introduction.

The book includes a preface by Paul Auster, a foreword by Edward Beckett, and is curated by Astrid Myers Rosset.

Image of the Times Literary Supplement and a featured article.

There was a reading of letters with key contributors to the book at an October 2016 event at The Center for Fiction. There will be a panel discussion with major Beckett directors and scholars in the coming weeks at the American Irish Historical Center.

About the editor
In addition to scholarship on Beckett and on modern and contemporary French literature, Oppenheim researches critical theory, psychoanalysis and the literary and visual arts, and creativity. She is currently completing a co-authored book: For Want of Ambiguity…: Order and Chaos in Art, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (under contract with Rowman and Littlefield).

Learn more
Contact Media Relations
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
French Program at Montclair State University