From An Abandoned Work, a "meditation for radio" by Samuel Beckett, was first broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Third Programme on Saturday, 14 December 1957 together with a selection from the novel Molloy. Donald McWhinnie, who already had a great success with All That Fall, directed the Irish actor Patrick Magee.

The work began as "a short prose piece, written about 1954-55, a step towards a novel soon abandoned" and Beckett's "first text written in English since Watt." Though initially published as a theater piece by the British publisher Faber and Faber following its performance on the BBC, it is now "generally anthologized with Beckett's short fiction".

Translated into French by Beckett with Ludovic and Agnès Janvier, it was published as "D'un ouvrage abandonné" by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1967 and included in Têtes-mortes, a collection of short stories.