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 Eugenides Edwin 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