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Stranger Than Fiction : Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel by Edwin Frank (2024, Hardcover)
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About this product
Product Identifiers
PublisherFarrar, Straus & Giroux
ISBN-100374270961
ISBN-139780374270964
eBay Product ID (ePID)25064997065
Product Key Features
Book TitleStranger than Fiction : Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel
Number of Pages480 Pages
LanguageEnglish
Publication Year2024
TopicComparative Literature
IllustratorYes
GenreLiterary Criticism
AuthorEdwin Frank
FormatHardcover
Dimensions
Item Height1.5 in
Item Weight22.6 Oz
Item Length9.4 in
Item Width6.2 in
Additional Product Features
Intended AudienceTrade
LCCN2024-017379
Dewey Edition23
Reviews"Frank is a dogged enthusiast . . . [His] curiosity and scope are both admirable, and his prose style is consistently punchy." -- Kirkus Reviews "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, "Frank is a dogged enthusiast . . . [His] curiosity and scope are both admirable, and his prose style is consistently punchy." -- Kirkus Reviews "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 "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 "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 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, 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-ccentury 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, "Frank is a dogged enthusiast . . . [His] curiosity and scope are both admirable, and his prose style is consistently punchy." -- Kirkus Reviews "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 "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 "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-ccentury 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, "Frank is a dogged enthusiast . . . [His] curiosity and scope are both admirable, and his prose style is consistently punchy." -- Kirkus Reviews "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 "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 "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, "Frank is a dogged enthusiast . . . [His] curiosity and scope are both admirable, and his prose style is consistently punchy." -- Kirkus Reviews "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 "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-ccentury 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, "Frank is a dogged enthusiast . . . [His] curiosity and scope are both admirable, and his prose style is consistently punchy." -- Kirkus Reviews "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, "Frank is a dogged enthusiast . . . [His] curiosity and scope are both admirable, and his prose style is consistently punchy." -- Kirkus Reviews "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 "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, 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-ccentury 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, "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
Dewey Decimal823.9109
SynopsisOne of the Washington Post' s 50 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A Boston Globe Best Book of 2024 "Ambitious, intelligent, and happily unpretentious." -- Louis Menand, The New Yorker "Convincing, idiosyncratic and often felicitous." -- Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review 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 Soseki 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 Márquez 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., For more than two decades, Edwin Frank has introduced readers to forgotten or overlooked texts as the director of the acclaimed publisher New York Review Books. In Stranger Than Fiction, he offers a survey of the key works that defined the twentieth-century novel. Starting with Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground of 1864, Frank shows how its twitchy, self-undermining narrator established a voice that would echo through the coming century. He illuminates Gertrude Stein's and Ernest Hemingway's reinvention of the American sentence, Colette's 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. Frank also shows how Japan's Soseki and Nigeria's Chinua Achebe adapted European models to their own ends--and how Vasily Grossman, Hans Erich Nossack, and Elsa Morante did the same as they attempted to reckon with the traumas of World War II. Later chapters range from Ralph Ellison and Marguerite Yourcenar to Gabriel García Márquez and W. G. Sebald. In the manner of Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise, 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.
LC Classification NumberPN3503.F67 2024
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