Samuel Beckett

(Newser) - Barney Rosset, founder of the envelope-pushing, censorship-defying Grove Press, died at age 89 on Tuesday after a double-heart-valve replacement, the New York Times reports. The irascible Rosset once described his press as "a breach in the dam of American Puritanism," and it lived up to that name, publishing...

(Newser) - Consumers short on time and even shorter on attention spans are turning to 140-character summaries of Great Books on Twitter, reports the Telegraph. Classics have been "distilled" into prose Twitterers can read in the time it takes to sneeze. Waiting for Godot? No problem: "Vladimir and Estragon stand...

(Newser) - Unlike millions of Americans, John Goodman hated Dan Conner, the beleaguered husband he famously played on Roseanne. “It’s one of those arrogant things that happen to you when you don’t realize the breaks you’re catching,” Goodman tells the New York Times. But the portly actor...

(Newser) - The British Library has bought the papers of Harold Pinter, the Nobel Prize-winning playwright, paying more than $2.2 million for 150 boxes of material, writes the Times of London. After the purchase of several British authors' archives by American universities, Pinter committed himself to finding a home in his...