Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank

Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank

AN ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024

'A masterclass in masterpieces' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

'Epic, personal, smart, wise, witty' JOSHUA COHEN

'Sizzles with passion' TOM McCARTHY

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 André 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 García Márquez 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.

Edwin Frank’s masterly account of the novel gone modern and the modern gone global is a critical history of the last literary centuryEpic, 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

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.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781911717201
ISBN 10	1911717200
Title	Stranger Than Fiction
Author	Edwin Frank
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Vintage Publishing
Year published	2024-11-21
Number of pages	480
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.