The present volume contains all of the short fictions — some of them no longer than a page — written and published by Beckett between 1950 and the early 1970s. Most were written in French, and they mostly belong within three loose sequences: «Texts for Nothing», «Fizzles» and «Residua».

The edition also includes two remarkable independent narratives: «From an Abandoned Work» and «As The Story Was Told».

All of these texts, whose unsleeping subject is themselves, demonstrate that the short story is one of the recurrent modes of Beckett's imagination, and occasions some of his greatest works.