Stranger Than Fiction

"For lovers of the history of literature, there is no better book to pick up . . . In a time in which books and book culture are under threat, Frank’s literary history proves to be more than just a trip through our greatest works; it’s an urgent call for daring in our reading and writing." —Chicago Review of Books

"[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

★ "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 is a dogged enthusiast . . . [His] curiosity and scope are both admirable, and his prose style is consistently punchy." —Kirkus Reviews

"Accomplished and erudite—both comprehensive and tightly focused in its historical and literary exegesis." —John Maher, Publishers Weekly

"Edwin Frank tackles an ambitious project that's ideally suited to his service as the longtime editorial director of New York Review Books and founder of the NYRB Classics series . . . A well-informed and lively survey of the novel's dramatic transformation in the 20th century." —Harvey Freedenberg, Shelf Awareness

“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

"Writing a book about the twentieth-century novel is, to quote Edwin Frank, to attempt to ‘measure the immeasurable,’ a task that Frank measures up to with brilliance. He is as shrewd and perspicacious about the worlds novelists create as he is about the worlds and milieus they live in and grapple with. Page by page, the book is a critical education at its most absorbing." —Amit Chaudhuri, author of Sojourn and Finding the Raga

"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, author of The Vixen

"As an editor, Edwin Frank has reinvented our ideas of the history of twentieth-century literature—patiently filling in gaps and upending values. As a critic, he now offers a gorgeously detailed version of the same disorientation. Stranger Than Fiction is a kind of portable library, a highspeed and dazzling tour of what the twentieth century made of fiction, and what fiction made of the twentieth century." —Adam Thirlwell, author of The Future Future

"This gallery of portraits—or collective biography—of the life and times of the 20th century novel recovers the lost pleasures of literary criticism: interesting on every page, enamored with the books as themselves, jargon-free, and full of things one doesn’t know and observations one has never made." —Eliot Weinberger, author of The Life of Tu Fu and Angels & Saints

"With characteristic originality and verve, Edwin Frank begins this brilliant tour d’horizon with Dostoevsky and the jagged, self-lacerating voice of the Underground Man; he then listens in to the broken music of modern humanity as reverberating in fiction from big masterworks to lesser-known books. By turns generous and acerbic, meditative and aphoristic, Frank juxtaposes writers with startling flair (Colette and Kipling; Nabokov and Carpentier) revealing an ever-deeper loss of bearings until he closes with the melancholy, haunted meanderings of W. G. Sebald. The frequencies that novels have registered are filled with rage and desolation, yet the overall effect of this close and passionate reckoning is exhilarating and transformative. If reading 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, author of Esmond and Ilia: An Unreliable Memoir

“In his visionary career as an editor, Edwin Frank has published works of special brilliance: each one adds to the sense of what’s possible on the page. 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 splendor and sends us back to the books anew.” —Rachel Cohen, author of Austen Years