I just stumbled upon an article about the upcoming appearance of a previously unpublished story by Samuel Beckett, which was rejected by a publisher of his in 1933. Charles Prentice of Chatto & Windus thought of it as a nightmare. He hated rejecting it, he wrote to Beckett, but he felt that people should not be subjected to such a puzzle. Entitled “Echo’s Bones,” the story will appear eighty-one year later under a Faber & Faber imprint. The article offers the briefest of extracts to entice the readers: “The dead die hard, they are trespassers on the beyond, they must take the place as they find it, the shafts and manholes back into the muck, till such time as the lord of the manor incurs through his long acquiescence a duty of care in respect of them.” About thirteen-thousand words in length, the story promises to be a nightmare, indeed. I would never even consider reading it had I not also read the publication date. And it is April 17, of all dates. My birthday! As it happens, my sixty-eighth birthday, too. To cut a long story short, I almost ordered the book from Amazon, but I stopped myself just in time. Now, how superstitious am I?