Picture of Nobody
Format:Paperback
Publisher:McNally Jackson Books
Publishing:28th May '26
£13.99
This title is due to be published on 28th May, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
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.”
“Picture of Nobody is truly unlike any other book I have read. Shakespeare and AntiShakespeare, a time-slipping tragicomedy of errors, grim and gorgeous, sparkling and sliding with wit and melancholy, a confusion triumphant, with some shady Beasts at the Doors. Its idiosyncrasy—and its rarity—have left it unread and unrecognised, and its author’s early death in WWII meant nothing else was to come from him. Picture of Nobody is a masterpiece, and a very strange one too.”
—David Tibet
“Mr. Owens overloads his page with an Elizabethan generosity. He has felt love and pain and beauty. He burns with a fine anger. At a time when so much unadventurous competence comes from the presses, this uncompromising, passionate voice should be heard with respect.”
—L.A.G. Strong
“Picture of Nobody is a witty, audacious reimagining of Shakespeare in 1930s London, written with great brio and panache. It conveys a lot about Shakespeare and his contemporaries in an original and inventive way, and also gives a dramatic picture of interwar turmoil. This remarkable work richly deserves rediscovery.”
—Mark Valentine
“Picture of Nobody has a fun premise, transposing the figure of William Shakespeare to (then-)contemporary (i.e. 1930s) London and showing how the talented writer might fare . . . Owens doesn’t just have writers of this and that day change places, with literary-historical play that also extends to and includes wordplay, making for multiple levels of entertaining meaning . . . As clever as the conceit of the novel is, it’s also the style that is particularly striking . . . An impressive and often very funny piece of work.”
—M. A. Orthofer, Complete Review
“A brilliant idea! . . . His purpose, apart from entertaining himself and us, is to expose the greater vulgarity of our day: and this he does with a ferocity and satiric anger which is extremely enjoyable.”
—London Daily News
“A fantastic affair in which a reincarnated Shakespeare with some of his contemporaries is found battling against twentieth-century odds . . . It is a brave and stimulating business, the kind of queer story which persistently remains in your mind . . . A provocative and whimsical story which deserves serious attention.”
—Ralph Straus, The Sunday Times
“The characters here are mediocre and that’s what makes this novel so great. The satirized life of a struggling poet is laugh-out-loud funny and at the same time shows how little has changed for everyday, unglamorous writers since this book’s initial publication 90 years ago. Picture of Nobody delivers and Owens, despite his flawed characters, is certainly no chump himself."
——Clarisse Jorah, Literati Bookstore (Ann Arbor, MI)
“Fresh and original.”
—Time & Tide
“A very amusing and witty jeu d’esprit . . . Mr. Owens is an original writer and his first novel can be warmly recommended.”
—A. G. Macdonell, The Observer
“The book is brilliant . . . Mr. Owens is a gifted and fiery writer; there are many ways of making one’s debut, and this which he has chosen—one might describe it as swallowing a crocodile—will anyhow give him a pleasant insouciance for his next attempt.”
—The Manchester Guardian
“It is quite unusually vivid both in irony and in genuine feeling; it has a good deal of humour and is arresting because of its sincerity . . . one can have no doubts about what the author means to say, nor that he says it well and with originality.”
—The Times
ISBN: 9781961341883
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
288 pages