Back in Dublin, wearily recognising that Dream might be unpublishable (it appeared posthumously in 1992), Beckett devoted his remaining energy to compiling a volume of short stories. Like his novel, these covered episodes in the life of Belacqua Shuah, a Dublin student who shared the author’s obsession with Dante and Augustine as well as his hang-ups about sex. Perhaps still smarting from one publisher’s suggestion that he forget the novel and try writing a bestseller, Beckett made half-hearted attempts to cultivate a less punishingly obscure prose style. But the influence of Joyce’s that he had so eagerly absorbed in Paris was hard to shed, and it was anyway, as he admitted to his publisher, “the only way I’m interested in writing”. In his new stories the reader was left to descry darkly the subjects of the stories – a wedding reception, a musical-literary salon, a man preparing and eating a cheese sandwich – through the self-consciously droll erudition of the prose. Even Beckett seems to have been creepingly conscious of the stories’ glib insincerity. “This writing,” he complained to Tom McGreevy, his friend in Paris, “is a bloody awful grind. I did two more 'short stories’, bottled climates, comme ça, sans conviction, because one has to do something or perish with ennui.” He wanted to call the collection “Draff”, an obscure word meaning hogwash or slop.