Beckett could hardly perhaps have more perfectly exemplified Malone's dictum - 'The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness' - than by choosing both French and English as expressive mediums, and then translating from one to the other. In so strikingly hybridized a context even to speak of 'the English fiction' runs the risk of seeming simply a convenient construct ill-adapted to what is in reality, if not a confused, then at least a potentially confusing state of affairs. But even Beckett's extraordinary writing career began with due deference to the compromise of composing in his mother tongue, so that for all practical purposes there is a kind of logic in reserving 'the English fiction' for the body of work he produced before turning forty. The work in question comprises three novels - Murphy', Watt, and Dream of fair to middling women (the last to surface but the first to be written); three stories - Assumption, A case in a thousand and Echo's bones (none of them strictly part of the corpus as Beckett came to conceive it); a book of prose fiction that is not quite a novel and not quite a collection of short stories - More pricks than kicks; and a scatter of non-fictional items more or less ancillary to his narrative enterprises.