First Love and Other Shorts : Grove Press : 9780802151315 : 0802151310 : 10 Mar 1994 : The volume brings together six previously uncollected works by the Nobel Prize-winning writer, among them a major work of fiction, First Love, which he began in French in 1946 but didn't finish translating into English until 1972. Also included is the stage work, Not I, which premiered at Lincoln Center in New York in 1972. The story of First Love, a man's musings about his youth occasioned by his visit to his father's grave, is designated by its title. Christopher Ricks, in New Statesman, described it as follows: ?The cracked and crackling narrator of First Love who tells of how he met a woman on a bench, went back to live with her, and left her as she was giving birth to his child?has all the pertinacity of that bone-deep fatigue which gives Beckett's decrepit figures (ruined leech-gatherers) their ruthless strength, their rigor, not mortis but of moribundity.? In Not I, a Mouth resembling a thro