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9781250397836

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Reviews

""There's no arguing with Frank's choices: They are convincing, idiosyncratic and often felicitous . . . One closes the rousing and fully committed Stranger Than Fiction not really closing it--which I think is Frank's intention--but feeling hunger for a big new novel that confronts today's America."" --Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) ""[An] exciting literary study . . . The alignment of pluralism and high standards that informs [Frank's NYRB Classics] imprint guides this book as well . . . Delightful . . . Superb."" --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal ""Ambitious and insightful . . . big and bold . . . Stranger Than Fiction's lasting achievement is to show how the 20th-century novel--that sprawling, capacious, international form--still informs not just how we read and write, but how we live."" --Tim Adams, Financial Times ""Stranger Than Fiction is a masterclass in masterpieces. There hasn't been a better work of historicist criticism since Robert Hughes's 1980 book The Shock of the New."" --Christopher Bray, Telegraph ""The novel becomes a character in this erudite but lively study, blowing up the form as a chaotic new century dawned, and innovating through world wars and other societal upheaval. This is a book about literature that follows a specific theme to exciting effect."" --Chris Vognar, The Boston Globe ""Stranger Than Fiction is a pleasure to read, in part, because of Frank's enthusiasm for and love of the novel as an artistic medium . . . Perhaps most strikingly of all, [Frank] shows how each novel related to the world in which it was conceived . . . Living through our own unfortunate times, there is much we can learn from them, and what a gift to have Edwin Frank's particular lens through which we can do so."" --Ilana Masad, Los Angeles Times ""The publication of Stranger Than Fiction: The Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, a book written by the legendary Edwin Frank, is something of a tablets-of-Moses moment . . . Thrilling . . . Stranger Than Fiction is a survey course taught by your most magnetic professor."" --Valerie Stivers, Compact ""Frank deftly captures how novelists translate, react to and sometimes shut out turbulent global events . . . The number of impassioned arguments that this book starts proves that the literary novel is not dead to everyone."" --The Economist ""In [Frank's] view, the twentieth-century novel is a distinct literary genre, and his book is an ambitious, intelligent, and happily unpretentious effort to map it . . . Frank is interested [. . .] in the feel of certain books and writers, and he is adept at capsule characterizations."" --Louis Menand, The New Yorker ""A hopscotch through masterworks, consistently pleasurable and often riveting . . . We read of energies gathered, innovations achieved, consolidations accomplished. There are fascinating and unexpected pairings."" --Christian Lorentzen, Air Mail ""For lovers of the history of literature, there is no better book to pick up . . . In a time in which books and book culture are under threat, Frank's literary history proves to be more than just a trip through our greatest works; it's an urgent call for daring in our reading and writing."" --Chicago Review of Books ""Stranger Than Fiction is a masterclass in masterpieces. There hasn't been a better work of historicist criticism since Robert Hughes's 1980 book The Shock of the New."" --Christopher Bray, The Telegraph ""[Frank] distinguishes himself as an erudite tour guide . . . [He] sheds light on numerous thematic and aesthetic through lines, all presented in sinewy prose . . . This rewards and delights."" --Publishers Weekly ""Borges believed that great readers were rarer even than great writers. On the strength of his first work of literary criticism, Frank, founder and editor of the remarkable New York Review Books imprint, is of that rare breed . . . Every chapter thrills to the telling detail, passionate engagement, and careful argument. This is eye-opening, delighted, close reading."" --Booklist (starred review) ""Frank is a dogged enthusiast . . . [His] curiosity and scope are both admirable, and his prose style is consistently punchy."" --Kirkus Reviews ""Accomplished and erudite--both comprehensive and tightly focused in its historical and literary exegesis."" --John Maher, Publishers Weekly ""Edwin Frank tackles an ambitious project that's ideally suited to his service as the longtime editorial director of New York Review Books and founder of the NYRB Classics series . . . A well-informed and lively survey of the novel's dramatic transformation in the 20th century."" --Harvey Freedenberg, Shelf Awareness ""An indispensable book for young writers who want to know where to go from here, for older writers who want to understand just what it was they did and why, and for any reader looking to deepen appreciation of the novel as an art form. Edwin Frank has a brilliant and original mind, and Stranger Than Fiction is the culmination of a lifetime's worth of reading and thinking at the highest level."" --Jeffrey Eugenides, author of Middlesex and The Marriage Plot ""Living as we do in a world where book culture is on the decline, Stranger Than Fiction comes as a comfort, a solace, and a revelation: a wealth of remarkable writing about even more remarkable writing."" --Vivian Gornick, author of The Odd Woman and the City and Unfinished Business ""Edwin Frank's masterly account of the novel gone modern and the modern gone global is a critical history of the last literary century. Emphasis on critical, emphasis on last. It's also a sub rosa memoir of a life lived through reading and a stealth polemic that elevates self-made taste above the conformity canons. Epic, personal, smart, wise, witty, with a heart going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."" --Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Netanyahus ""Writing a book about the twentieth-century novel is, to quote Edwin Frank, to attempt to 'measure the immeasurable, ' a task that Frank measures up to with brilliance. He is as shrewd and perspicacious about the worlds novelists create as he is about the worlds and milieus they live in and grapple with. Page by page, the book is a critical education at its most absorbing."" --Amit Chaudhuri, author of Sojourn and Finding the Raga ""At once erudite and entertaining, Edwin Frank's Stranger Than Fiction is a pleasure and an inspiration, a call to read or reread the novels--the masterpieces--he discusses and to see them through the lens provided by his fascinating biographical information and brilliant literary insights."" --Francine Prose, author of The Vixen ""As an editor, Edwin Frank has reinvented our ideas of the history of twentieth-century literature--patiently filling in gaps and upending values. As a critic, he now offers a gorgeously detailed version of the same disorientation. Stranger Than Fiction is a kind of portable library, a highspeed and dazzling tour of what the twentieth century made of fiction, and what fiction made of the twentieth century."" --Adam Thirlwell, author of The Future Future ""This gallery of portraits--or collective biography--of the life and times of the 20th century novel recovers the lost pleasures of literary criticism: interesting on every page, enamored with the books as themselves, jargon-free, and full of things one doesn't know and observations one has never made."" --Eliot Weinberger, author of The Life of Tu Fu and Angels & Saints ""With characteristic originality and verve, Edwin Frank begins this brilliant tour d'horizon with Dostoevsky and the jagged, self-lacerating voice of the Underground Man; he then listens in to the broken music of modern humanity as reverberating in fiction from big masterworks to lesser-known books. By turns generous and acerbic, meditative and aphoristic, Frank juxtaposes writers with startling flair (Colette and Kipling; Nabokov and Carpentier) revealing an ever-deeper loss of bearings until he closes with the melancholy, haunted meanderings of W. G. Sebald. The frequencies that novels have registered are filled with rage and desolation, yet the overall effect of this close and passionate reckoning is exhilarating and transformative. If reading is an art that risks being lost, then Stranger than Fiction reminds us of its indispensability--to knowing ourselves and what brought us to where we are."" --Marina Warner, author of Esmond and Ilia: An Unreliable Memoir ""In his visionary career as an editor, Edwin Frank has published works of special brilliance: each one adds to the sense of what's possible on the page. As one reads his illuminating Stranger than Fiction, one follows the many paths of the twentieth-ccentury novel in the company of Frank's own prodigious reading, his intimate understanding of writers' lives and discoveries, and his deep insight into the varieties of experience a novel can create; the form itself emerges with fresh splendor and sends us back to the books anew."" --Rachel Cohen, author of Austen Years

Author Information

Edwin Frank is the editorial director of New York Review Books and the founder of the NYRB Classics series. Born in Boulder, Colorado and educated at Harvard College and Columbia University, he has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow and a Lannan Fellow and is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities. He has taught in the Columbia Writing Program and served on the jury of 2015 Booker International Prize. A Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and a recipient of a lifetime award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for distinguished service to the arts, he is the author of Snake Train: Poems 1984-2013.

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