A legendary editor's survey of the twentieth-century novel and how it shaped the form for years to comeA legendary editor's survey of the twentieth-century novel and how it shaped the fiction of the futureFor 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, 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. Also included are Japan's Natsume Soseki and Nigeria's Chinua Achebe, as well as Vasily Grossman, Hans Erich Nossack and Elsa Morante. Later chapters range from Ralph Ellison and Marguerite Yourcenar to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and WG Sebald.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.
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
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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