Description

A legendary editor’s survey of the twentieth-century novel and how it shaped the fiction of the future

‘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

‘Stranger Than Fiction sizzles with passion as it tracks the contortions of a volatile form in a volatile time’ TOM McCARTHY

‘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

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, 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.

Publisher Review

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 treading 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 kind of portable library, a high-speed and dazzling tour of what the twentieth century made of fiction, and what fiction made of the twentieth century’ — Adam Thirlwell ‘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