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
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
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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