Stranger Than Fiction

Reviews / Votes

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 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 Stranger than Fiction sizzles with passion as it tracks the contortions of a volatile form in a volatile time -- Tom McCarthy 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 This gallery of portraits - or collective biography - of the life and times of the twentieth-century novel recovers the lost pleasures of literary criticism: interesting on every page, enamoured with the books as themselves, jargon-free and full of things one doesn't know and observations one has never made -- Eliot Weinberger 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 The sensitivity and -sincerity with which Frank makes his case will send readers back to the originals with newfound respect * Tablet * 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 splendour and sends us back to the books anew -- Rachel Cohen 'Stranger than Fiction is a kind of portable library, a high-speed and dazzling tour of what the twentieth century made of fiction, and what fiction made of the twentieth century' -- Adam Thirlwell A highly readable romp through some of the 20th century's key literary milestones. Comes highly recommended as both a reference book, and an enjoyable read in its own right * Teach Secondary *