Edwin Frank

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 Sōseki 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.

Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel

Stranger than Fiction 

Writers Rediscover Literature's Hidden Classics (New York Review Books Classics)

Unknown Masterpieces

One 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 Sōseki 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.

Stranger Than Fiction

Further Adventures Of Pinocchio

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of NYRB Classics, a handpicked anthology of selections from the series. In Greek mythology, Ariadne gave Theseus a ball of red thread to guide him through the labyrinth, and the Red Thread offers a path through and a way to explore the ins and outs and twists and turns of the celebrated NYRB Classics series, now twenty years old. The collection brings together twenty-five pieces drawn from the more than five hundred books that have come out as NYRB Classics over the last twenty years. Stories, essays, interviews, poems, along with chapters from novels and memoirs and other longer narratives have been selected by Edwin Frank, the series editor, to chart a distinctive, entertaining, and thought-provoking course across the expansive and varied terrain of the Classics series.

A Selection

The Red Thread: Twenty Years of NYRB Classics

In this original collection, several of today's finest writers introduce little-known treasures of literature that they count among their favorite books. Here Toni Morrison celebrates a great Guinean storyteller whose novel of mystical adventure and surprising revelation transforms our image of Africa, while Susan Sontag raises the curtain on a distant summer when three of the greatest poets of the twentieth century exchanged love letters like no others. Here too John Updike analyzes the rare art of an English comic genius, Jonathan Lethem considers a hard-boiled and heartbreaking story of prison life, and Michael Cunningham uncovers the secrets of what may well be the finest short novel in modern American literature. Other contributors include such noted authors as Arthur C. Danto, Lydia Davis, Elizabeth Hardwick, Francine Prose, Luc Sante, Colm Tóibín, Eliot Weinberger, and James Wood. Lucid, polished, provocative, inspiring, these essays are models of critical appreciation, offering personal, impassioned, thoughtful responses to a wide range of wonderful books. Unknown Masterpieces is a treat for all lovers of great writing and a useful and stimulating guidebook for readers eager to venture off literature's beaten tracks. Eliot Weinberger on Hindoo Holiday by J.R. Ackerley Arthur C. Danto on The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac John Updike on Seven Men by Max Beerbohm Jonathan Lethem on On the Yard by Malcolm Braly Toni Morrison on The Radiance of the King by Camara Laye Colm Tóibín on The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley Francine Prose on A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes Susan Sontag on Letters: Summer 1926 by Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke Luc Sante on Classic Crimes by William Roughead James Wood on The Golovlyov Family by Shchedrin Elizabeth Hardwick on The Unpossessed by Tess Slesinger Lydia Davis on The Life of Henry Brulard by Stendhal Michael Cunningham on The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott

Writers Rediscover Literature's Hidden Classics

Donatien Grau

Antoine Caro

New poems from 100 of the world’s brightest contemporary poets, all about a common subject: the Louvre—exploring the many pleasures, provocations, and surprises that the museum and its collection inspire. Of the world's great museums, the Louvre is the most encompassing, a sumptuous collection that includes not only some of the most celebrated works of art of all time, but fascinating, perplexing, splendid, and beautiful objects of all kinds, all housed in a building, itself monumental, that was once the seat of the kings of France. In the grand corridors and multiplying backrooms of the Louvre, the history of the world and the history of art and the history of how we look and think about art and its place in our lives challenge and delight us at every corner. Few other public spaces are at once so haunted and so alive. A unique collaboration between New York Review Books and the Louvre Museum, At the Louvre presents a hundred poems, newly commissioned exclusively for this volume, by a hundred of the world's most vibrant poets. They write about works from the museum's collection. They write about the museum and its history. They write what they see and feel, and together they take us on a tour of the museum and its galleries like no other, one that is an irresistible feast for the ear and mind and eye. Some of the poets in At the Louvre: Simon Armitage; Barbara Chase-Riboud; Hélène Dorion; Jon Fosse; Fanny Howe; Kenneth Goldsmith; Lisette Lombé; Tedi López Mills; Precious Okoyomon; Charles Pennequin; Blandine Rinkel; Yomi Şode; Krisztina Tóth; Jan Wagner; Elizabeth Willis.

Edwin Frank

Books

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