Stan Gontarski's most recent book project, A Companion To Samuel Beckett (Wiley/Blackwell, March 2010), joins his extensive library of works focused on Irish author Samuel Beckett, and it immediately generated excitement and praise among scholars and readers.

William Hutchings, a Beckett scholar and professor of English at the University of Alabama, calls it an "amazing collection of essays" and "the Beckett event of the year." Rhys Tranter writes on his blog, A Piece of Monologue, that "A Companion to Samuel Beckett promises to be a significant contribution to contemporary academic debates on his work. . . . In fact, I would not be surprised if Gontarski's clever and expansive collection becomes one of the go-to texts for distinguished scholars and newcomers alike."

Such appreciation for Gontarski, and his success with A Companion, comes as no surprise, of course. He is considered a world authority on Beckett, and when Gontarski was named the 2008-2009 Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English, chairman Ralph Berry wrote in his citation that Gontarski is the "dean of Beckett studies" who has made Tallahassee "the world capital of Beckett scholarship."

Gontarski was commissioned in October 2005 to produce A Companion, which was just a few months before Beckett scholars around the world began commemorating and celebrating the centenary of the author's birth. Gontarski wrote the introduction and another essay, "Within a Budding Grove: Publishing Beckett in America," which concentrates on Beckett's relationship with Grove Press and its publisher, Barney Rosset. He also co-wrote "'The Knowing Non-Exister': Thirteen Ways of Reading Texts for Nothing" with C.J. Ackerley. And Gontarski recruited respected academics to fill the remaining pages: the contributors' list, Tranter writes, is "a veritable Who's Who of the last 40 years of Beckett scholarship."

In his introduction, Gontarski points out that popular culture may be blunting Beckett's "avant-garde edge." With allusions to him in television sitcoms, mentions during quiz shows, one quarter million hits on a Google image search, one hundred thousand possibilities returned during a YouTube search, and even a Beckett Wall on Facebook, the iconic Irish author's "absorption into the fabric of global commerce raises questions of whether or not some essential ingredients of Beckett's art are lost in this mass, commercial, electronic appeal."

And while Beckett's popularity seems to be steadily increasing among the general population, Gontarski writes, the Beckett Estate is taking steps to make sure that present-day stage productions of his works remain true to Beckett's original productions. Yet these legal actions and demands that directors put on "'authentic' productions… Xerox copies of previous productions," inevitably raise the question, according to Gontarski, of "whether Beckett's drama is… becoming theatrically irrelevant to the twenty-first century."

"The compilation of A Companion to Samuel Beckett will not, of course, necessarily resolve such questions," Gontarski continues, "but the discourse here continues to engage the issues and is of a piece with contemporary attempts to look at the continued integrity of Beckett's art after his death and into the twenty-first century and so contributes to the reassertion of its vitality in the face of commodity culture."

With another Beckett publication on his bookshelf, Gontarski will now turn his attention to Tennessee Williams and the playwright's "impact… on the canon of European drama, particularly performances and publications in, but not restricted to, Italy," he says. The general editors of a bilingual book series on European theater called Canone teatrale europeo / Canon of European Drama have invited Gontarski to edit a volume on Williams, particularly his A Streetcar Named Desire, and his impact on European theater.

"My volume will deal not only with the popularity of Williams in Europe, particularly in Italy where he was consistently well received and where he lived for a time, but how Williams's play fits into (or at times against) the fabric of European culture," Gontarski says.

Gontarski will be working simultaneously on a second, related, Italian theater project, preparing a collection of his essays in Italian for publication under the working title, Visualizzazione Beckett, which he expects to have complete by the end of the fall 2011.