While this is definitely a niche product, fans of literary criticism and the 20th century novel will eat this up. Rather than being comprehensive, Edwin Frank has chosen to dive deep into about 30 or so novels that span the century, choosing some of the usual suspects (e.g Thomas Mann, Proust, Joyce, Nabokov, D. H Lawrence, Woolf), while also pointing out plenty of unusual novels that I had never hear of. Normally, I don't like reading literary criticism about things I haven't read, but Frank's blend of biographical and historical context, plot description, and astute critical views made these titles especially interesting. I look forward to reading some of these titles in the future.

I'm giving this five stars, even though I felt the last section on the postwar period ran out of steam. I am simply not sure if it's the author or the reader who ran out of steam, especially since I read much of that portion while doom scrolling on election night 2024.

Thanks to FSG and netgalley for providing a copy for early review.

Edwin Frank gelingt mit Stranger Than Fiction ein bemerkenswerter Rundgang durch die Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, erzählt durch die Linse der Literatur. 📖✨ Anhand von ikonischen und weniger bekannten Werken beleuchtet Frank, wie Romanautoren mit den drängenden Fragen und Umwälzungen ihrer Zeit umgingen.

Die Eröffnung mit Dostojewskis Aufzeichnungen aus dem Kellerloch ist besonders eindrucksvoll, da sie den Weg für eine Erzählstimme ebnet, die das gesamte Jahrhundert prägen sollte. Frank zeigt, wie Romane von H.G. Wells bis zu Gertrude Stein nicht nur neue literarische Formen schufen, sondern auch die gesellschaftlichen Normen hinterfragten.

Die Themen reichen von den Traumata des Ersten und Zweiten Weltkriegs bis hin zu den kulturellen und politischen Umwälzungen, die die Welt im 20. Jahrhundert prägten. Besonders beeindruckend ist, wie Frank Autoren wie Natsume Sōseki und Chinua Achebe in den Kontext einbettet und deren Werke in Bezug zu den europäischen Traditionen setzt, um ihre einzigartigen Perspektiven zu verdeutlichen.

Mit seiner tiefen Einsicht und seinem einfühlsamen Stil lädt Stranger Than Fiction den Leser ein, die Kraft des Romans zu erkennen, sich neu zu erfinden und ein Medium der Veränderung zu sein. Frank macht deutlich, dass die Literatur immer ein Spiegel der Menschheit ist – in ihren dunkelsten und hellsten Momenten.

Für Literaturbegeisterte und Geschichtsinteressierte ist dieses Buch ein unverzichtbares Werk, das sowohl informiert als auch inspiriert. Ein wahrhaft fesselndes Leseerlebnis! 🌍📚

Panoramic and deeply insightful, demonstrating the arc of the novel's development from the Victorian Age through the 20th c,. this book kept me on my toes. I particularly enjoyed the chapters on authors I have read. But I did feel over my head with this one!

The chapters of this book explore authors and select works within the context of original and intriguing themes selected by Frank. There are many brilliant passages and endless insights, and Edwin Frank shows a profound and broad understanding of his material. Each chapter contains much more historical, biographical and social context than I anticipated, but that was a particularly enjoyable aspect of the readings for me. I particularly enjoyed the chapters on Woolf, DH Lawrence, and Gertrude Stein. Some of the authors were unknown to me, and those chapters, though interesting, took me several days to read through. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves literature and is looking for a deeper understanding of the story of literature itself over the last century and a half.

Going into Stranger than Fiction, I knew Edwin Frank is a learned professor and book reviewer, but what makes this book shine is how speaks to a broad audience. You don’t have to be pursuing a Ph.D in Literature at Columbia to follow this (allow Frank does teach for the Writing program there).

Essentially, this book follows two related events: more broadly, following the crucial events of 20th century fiction and more specifically the rise of the novel as the dominant consumer for written material.

Of course, as any historian will tell you, Frank first has to backtrack well before the 20th century to provide proper context. Dostoevsky was such a profound influence on a number of 20th century writers that it makes sense to start with him, plus it allows Frank to roll in other key Russian authors like Tolstoy, Turgenev and Gogol. I’ve always wanted to read Notes from Underground, but after reading this book, I think I have a much more nuanced vision of the pros and the cons of the book and certainly the importance of it.

He continues to trace many other influential novels, including The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells, an interesting choice because the book was considered a failure upon publication. Frank delves into why he chose to focus on this one versus some of Wells’ more popular titles.

I was less enthused about some titles, but I believe he did an excellent job of covering a wide range of influence, and it’s unlikely any author could capture the full range.

Honestly, I wish there were more books like this. So many books that choose to focus on influential novels get into narrow themes and take away the key historical contexts, the background of the author and looking at broader technical aspects. For instance, instead of focusing on the question of gender so often seen in literary criticism (which is fine, per se), Frank sets his focus on Madame Bovary as an author (Flaubert) who changed the lens of realism, who played with words in such a skillful way all while having a pretty average plot. I would highly recommend this book for anyone interested in 20th century fiction and more specifically, the rise of the novel.

Frank's work isn't an attempt to establish a definitive canon or prescribe literary theory. It defies categorization as a straightforward history, yet its insightful exploration of 20th century fiction unfolds in a captivating, non-condescending manner, akin to a cherished conversation with an intellectually stimulating friend who shares my passion for language and has delved far deeper into understanding literary nuances. While I've only read a fraction of the books discussed by Frank—others await my attention on my shelves—the joy and enlightenment his writing brings transcend familiarity with each text. His erudition and enthusiasm for literature left me exhilarated and enriched, illuminating how writers influence and inspire one another, and why their works resonate so profoundly.

I picked up this book as a science fiction reference book specifically for the chapter on HG Wells. I recommended this book to the currently popular science fiction podcast which looks at the myth-making of science fiction.

I really enjoyed this book. I was particularly enamored of how Frank includes both well-known and lesser known novels in his survey. There were many that I knew about and was quite familiar with...and he had new things to say about those. And, there were titles I had never heard of. Reading this has definitely expanded my TBR pile and really made me think in a different way about novels--both of this era and beyond. A fascinating read!

I'm so grateful to Edwin Frank for writing this book. And I'm grateful to Alex Ross, in a way, too, for writing his book about 20th century music--a book I also loved--and that Frank cites in the opening pages of Stranger than Fiction as giving him the template he needed to write his book about 20th century fiction. This book isn't a stab at creating a canon; it isn't prescriptive; it isn't trying to build a theory of literature. It isn't even a history, per se, although it covers a certain time period in a sometime-chronological manner. What it is: Amazing. Never condescending, never pandering. It's like a conversation with the friend I always wanted to know, the one who loves language as much as I do and who has thought a great deal more than I have, though, about how literary language works. I've only read about 1/3 of the books discussed here by Frank (maybe another 1/3 are in my bookshelves, aspirationally acquired, and waiting for me to pick them up one day), but it didn't matter that I hadn't read every book Frank wants to tell me more about, because everything he wrote about every book made me understand better why literature is meaningful, and how writers learn from one another, and how their works relate to and enrich one another. I loved the erudition. This book exhilarated me.

A really lovely sampling of important 20th century novels, with great biographical details about the authors and their historical period, and cogent and intriguing analyses of the novels at hand. I found each chapter really fun to read and kept picking up the book to read, even when I thought from the table of contents I'd skip it—I learned a lot about authors I'd heard of but haven't read yet (like Gide and Colette and Soseki) and enjoyed reading about ones I'm more familiar with, as well. The writing and criticism is sharp and also very funny!

Kind of saucy to say Notes from the Underground is the first modernist novel.

Definitely convinced me to read some of the novels I hadn't heard of before, and also check out some other literary critics mentioned.

Information overload.
It drags, at times, and is full of difficult sentences that might put you off from reading.

The Ambition and Scale of this book is appreciable.
I've discovered a lot of new writers after reading this.

I've not read any of the books that comprise the chapters of this book. In most cases, I've heard of the writers.
In a way, this book gives everything away about the story of a particular book and gives nothing away at the same time. The sentence structure in the some of the chapters is just ludicrous and frustrating at times. A proliferation of commas, semi-colons, and hyphens make the sentences a labour to read. On certain occassions, it feels like reading the ramblings of a mad man.

Despite all that, there are several really interesting chapters that are well written and a bit easier to read. They provide great insights into the history of the novel and the writers and their lives. It's just that these are dampened by the arduous chapters that I've described above.

Though Stranger Than Fiction is Edwin Frank’s first book on the novel, anyone who is a serious reader is very familiar with his work. Frank is the editor of New York Review Classics, which along with new directions, only publishes fiction of the highest quality, books that are often from places we don’t expect to find classics by authors often previously unknown. It was Franck who rescued John Williams’ Stoner from obscurity, who has made much of Victor Serge’s work available to English-language readers (full disclosure: NTRB Classics has published a volume of Serge I co-translated, along with a coupl e of other books), and reissued Vasily Grossman’s massive classics Stalingrad and Fate and---. His sensibility and judgment are uequaled, and Stranger Than Fiction, which traces the origns and the apth of the novel in the twentieth century is a book of inestimable value.
The twentieth century novel, Frank convincingly posits, dates to the middle of the nineteenth century, whose forms were different from those of the subsecuent century. with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. The solitary creature in his hole, at odds with his society, who will appear om foction over the following decades, people like Meursault in The Stranger and the Dangling man in Bellow’s Dangling Man , grows from the Underground Man. Andre Gide, too, established a template with his novel The Immoralist, in which the main character pursues his own interests and desires, heedless of those around him. Twentieth century writers “exist in a world where the dynamic balance between self and society that the nineteenth century novel sought to maintain can no longer be maintained, even as fiction.”
Frank casts a wide net in demonstrating the path of the novel, taking in a disparate group, from familiar names like HG Wells, marcel Proust, jamesJoyce, Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf, to less celebrated writers who have, even so, played a role in the development of the form. Frank makes his case for the writers he chose (and clearly loves) elegantly and convincingly. Nothing in the world will get me to like Gertrude Stein, but Frank’s case for the importance of her sentences pFrannk frequently praises his writers for their skill at constructing sentences – for those who followed her.
Stranger Than Fiction is a book that assumes the literacy of its readers. Each chapter includes an excellent brief biographical note about the author in question, and his analyses of books are so skillfully done that even in the cases where the reader hasn’t read them his technical analyses still hold interest. There’s no name dropping for the sake of it here, and the way with which he ties writers together is breathtaking. In writing about WG Sebald he invokes in a shrt aspan Gide, Robert Walser, Jseph Conrad, Faulkner, Claude Simon, all of it tied neatly to Paul Celan.
Stranger Than Fiction is a rare thing: a volume of criticsm that is a thrilling read.

In my GoodBooks review, I mentioned that I struggled to make my way through the work. Much of it I found fascinating especially how publication mirrored historical events, but there were so many obscure titles that were compared to better known titles, but many of the unknown titles referenced didn’t lead me to want to explore them.

A delightful romp through the history of the novel during the 'long 20th century'. The study offers an overview of seminal works that skillfully blends author biography with literary analysis and cultural history. I feel the examination is largely an investigation of modernism in the 20th century, with attention to narrative techniques that attempted to capture the internal narrative of life juxtaposed against the major historical traumas of the century. I feel the author starts his assessment at an earlier historical moment than I feel is necessary, but the subsequent analysis is fascinating.