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Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel
by Edwin Frank
A legendary editor's reckoning with the twentieth-century novel and the urgent messages it sends.
"How can we live differently?" a young woman urgently demands in Virginia Woolf's novel The Years. It is the 1930s, war and death are in the air, but her question was asked again and again in the course of a century where things changed fast and changed all the time. The century brought world wars, revolutions, automobiles, movies, and the internet, votes for women, death camps. The century brought questions. Novelists in the twentieth century had a question of their own: how can we write a novel as startling and unforeseen as the world we live in? Again and again they did, transforming the novel as the century remade the world.
Imagine the history of the twentieth-century novel recounted with the urgency and intimacy of a novel. That's what Edwin Frank, the legendary editor who has run the New York Review Books publishing imprint since its inception, does in Stranger than Fiction. With penetrating insight and originality, Frank introduces us to books, some famous, some little-known, from the whole course of the century and from around the world. Starting with Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground of 1864, Frank shows how its twitchy, self-undermining, and never-satisfied narrator established a voice that would echo through the coming century. He illuminates the political vision of H.G. Wells's science fiction, Colette and Andre Gide's subversions of traditional gender roles, and Gertrude Stein's untethering of the American sentence. He describes the monumental ambition of books such as Mrs. Dalloway, The Magic Mountain and The Man Without Qualities to rebuild a world of human possibility upon the ruins of World War I and explores how Japan's Natsume Sōseki and Nigeria's Chinua Achebe broke open European models to reflect their own, distinct histories and experience. Here too are Vasily Grossman, Anna Banti, and Elsa Morante reckoning in specific ways with the traumas of World War II, while later chapters range from Marguerite Yourcenar and V. S. Naipaul to Gabriel García Marquez and W.G. Sebald.
The story as a whole is one of fearless, often reckless exploration, as well as unfathomable desolation. Throughout, we discover the power of the novel to reinvent itself, to find a way for itself, to live differently. Stranger than Fiction offers a new vision of the history and art of the novel and of a dark and dazzling time in whose light and shadow we still stand.
"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] 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
"Frank is a dogged enthusiast ... [His] curiosity and scope are both admirable, and his prose style is consistently punchy." ―Kirkus Reviews
"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
This information about Stranger Than Fiction was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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 the 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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