Cher Auteur
ou Comment refuser un chef-d'œuvre
by Riccardo Bozzi
illustrations by Giancarlo Ascari and Pia Valentinis

What if the world’s greatest writers had to deal with today’s publishing standards, marketing requests, self-censorship, and political correctness? It's likely that many masterpieces would never have seen the light of day. What would the book industry have said to Sophocles about his murderous and - God forbid - incestuous story? How would they have received Thomas Mann’s novella (the cursed genre) Death in Venice? And how about Kafka’s choice of a cockroach as the protagonist of his masterpiece?
This book brings together a series of hilarious fictional rejection letters that authors such as Kafka, Melville, Cervantes, and Shakespeare might have received if they were around today.

“L’anti-panthéon littéraire. (…) Comparées aux chefs-d’œuvre pris pour cible, les paroles ridicules et outrancières [d’un éditeur contemporain tyrannique] produisent évidemment l’effet escompté : raviver l’éclat des grands classiques.”
Le Monde

“Hilarant.”
Elle France

“Un libro intelligente e spassosissimo.”
Pagina99

"Dopo questa lettura, assolutamente esilarante, vi sentirete un po' meno soli quando incasserete un rifiuto e decisamente meno stronzi quando sarete voi a farlo."
Huffington Post Italia

Rights sold:

France: hélium éditions, 2016
Italy: Bompiani, 2017
Korea: KumKun Books, 2018
Spain: Avenauta, 2018
China: Beijing United Publishing, 2020
Croatia: Znanje, 2021
For foreign rights inquiries, please contact us.