First published 2019
Samuel Beckett's "Dante and the Lobster" follows a man's mundane yet surreal trek to boil a lobster. As he navigates the routine tasks of his day, the protagonist is increasingly confronted by the irrational and the inexplicable, from a malfunctioning alarm clock to a lobster that refuses to die. Darkly comic and existentially unsettling, the story deftly captures the disorientation of modern life and the futility of our attempts to impose order on the chaos of the world.
Genres: short-stories, literary-fiction, 20th-century
Vibes: dark, existential, surreal, thought-provoking
Tropes: disorientation, futility, unreliable-narrator
Period: 20th-Century
30 pages · Paperback · Faber & Faber