Elisabeth

Transposed into the early twentieth century, a nonentity named Shakespeare rails against poverty, mediocrity, and misunderstanding, in forgotten modernist Philip Owens's brilliant, one-of-a-kind satire.
Every year, there's a new crop of sad, dirty poet boys coming up to the city without a penny to their names. In six months' time, who on earth will remember these nobodies, with their so-called blank verse and their extravagant plots-this Marlowe, Kyd, and Will "Shakespere"? (A pseudonym, surely!)Better that they write thrillers, or advertising copy, or speeches for the media baron John Falstaff, who looks to be running for office. Now there's a man with a strong hand, who'll keep us out of any nasty foreign wars!
Published in 1936 and soon forgotten in the chaos of World War II, Picture of Nobody is one of the strangest, most accomplished, and most remarkable one-offs in English fiction. A comic yet credible reimagining of the milieu of Elizabethan London in modernist dress, it transcends its premise to provide a poignant portrait, of a Shakespearean mind coming to grips with the twentieth century. Populated by an assortment of characters familiar from Will's life and writing both, it is as much a loving parody as a grim prophecy regarding the fate of genius in "interesting times."

Eric Rohmer (1920-2010) was born Maurice Schérer in the province of Lorraine. After moving to Paris and befriending cinephiles and future directors Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and François Truffaut, among others, he began writing, editing, and publishing film criticism under a pseudonym supposedly cobbled together from the names of Erich von Stroheim and Sax Rohmer, respectively. Gradually following the lead of his fellow Cahiers du Cinéma contributors from theory to practice, he went on to direct more than twenty acclaimed feature films, including My Night at Maud's, Claire's Knee, and The Green Ray.