Stranger Than Fiction

Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel

Edwin Frank

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English

Random House
25 February 2025

A legendary editor's survey of the twentieth-century novel and how it shaped the form for years to come

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

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.

By: Edwin Frank
Imprint: Random House
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 232mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 37mm
Weight: 578g
ISBN: 9781911717218
ISBN 10: 1911717219
Pages: 480
Publication Date: 25 February 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

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.

Reviews for Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel

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