Stranger Than Fiction

Stranger Than Fiction is a masterclass in masterpieces. There hasn’t been a better work of historicist criticism since Robert Hughes’s 1980 book The Shock of the New * Sunday Telegraph *Essential for anyone who loves novels, this book examines how writers translated the seismic and bloody 20th century into memorable fiction * Economist, Books of the Year *This is the most engaging imagining of the progress of the 20th-century novel you will read… Frank writes as an enthusiast…always alive to the stories he is telling and the arguments he makes * Observer *Stranger Than Fiction’s lasting achievement is to show how the 20th-century novel — that sprawling, capacious, international form — still informs not just how we read and write, but how we live * Financial Times *A DeLorean time machine, put together by a benevolent mad scientist, a professor offering a luxury seminar for a bargain-basement price … A passion project, not a syllabus * New York Times *Stranger Than Fiction is testimony to its author’s sheer appetite for books… Frank describes his own modern canon, and, refreshingly, without worrying about what the academics might think * New Statesman *In [Frank’s] view, the twentieth-century novel is a distinct literary genre, and his book is an ambitious, intelligent and happily unpretentious effort to map it * New Yorker *My favourite non-fiction book this year — and an excellent antidote to brain rot — is Edwin Frank’s Stranger than Fiction…it’s both a way to exercise deep reading and a portal for re-engaging with some of the greatest works in history – Mia Levitin * Financial Times *‘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 EugenidesEdwin 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

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.

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