Overview

A legendary editor's reckoning with the twentieth-century novel and the urgent messages it sends. For more than two decades, Edwin Frank has introduced readers to forgotten or overlooked texts as director of the acclaimed publisher New York Review Books. In Stranger than Fiction, he offers a legendary editor's survey of the key works that defined the twentieth-century novel. Starting with Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (1864), Frank shows how its twitchy, self-undermining narrator established a voice that would echo through the coming century. He illuminates Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway's reinvention of the American sentence; Colette and Andre Gide's subversions of traditional gender roles; and the monumental ambitions of works such as Mrs Dalloway, The Magic Mountain and The Man Without Qualities to encompass their times. Frank also shows how Japan's Soseki and Nigeria's Chinua Achebe adapted European models to their own ends - and how Vasily Grossman, Hans Erich Nossack and Elsa Morante did the same as they attempted to reckon with the traumas of World War II. Later chapters range from Ralph Ellison and Marguerite Yourcenar to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and WG Sebald. In the manner of Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise, Frank makes sense of the century by mixing biographical portraiture, cultural history and close encounters with great works of art. In so doing he renews our appreciation of the paradigmatic art form of our times.

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9781529925722

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Reviews

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 * Sunday Telegraph * A DeLorean time machine, put together by a benevolent mad scientist, a professor offering a luxury seminar for a bargain-basement price . . . A passion project, not a syllabus * New York Times * 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 * New Yorker * Edwin Frank’s masterly account of the novel gone modern and the modern gone global is a critical history of the last literary century. Epic, personal, smart, wise, witty -- Joshua Cohen 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 Stranger than Fiction sizzles with passion as it tracks the contortions of a volatile form in a volatile time -- Tom McCarthy 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 This gallery of portraits – or collective biography – of the life and times of the twentieth-century novel recovers the lost pleasures of literary criticism: interesting on every page, enamoured with the books as themselves, jargon-free and full of things one doesn’t know and observations one has never made -- Eliot Weinberger 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 As one reads his illuminating Stranger than Fiction, one follows the many paths of the twentieth-century 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 splendour and sends us back to the books anew -- Rachel Cohen

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 * Sunday Telegraph * Essential for anyone who loves novels, this book examines how writers translated the seismic and bloody 20th century into memorable fiction * Economist, *Books of the Year* * This is the most engaging imagining of the progress of the 20th-century novel you will read… Frank writes as an enthusiast…always alive to the stories he is telling and the arguments he makes * Observer * 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 * Financial Times * A DeLorean time machine, put together by a benevolent mad scientist, a professor offering a luxury seminar for a bargain-basement price . . . A passion project, not a syllabus * New York Times * Stranger Than Fiction is testimony to its author’s sheer appetite for books… Frank describes his own modern canon, and, refreshingly, without worrying about what the academics might think * New Statesman * 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 * New Yorker * My favourite non-fiction book this year — and an excellent antidote to brain rot — is Edwin Frank’s Stranger than Fiction…it’s both a way to exercise deep reading and a portal for re-engaging with some of the greatest works in history -- Mia Levitin * Financial Times * '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 Edwin Frank’s masterly account of the novel gone modern and the modern gone global is a critical history of the last literary century. Epic, personal, smart, wise, witty -- Joshua Cohen

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 Programme and served on the jury of the 2015 International Booker 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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