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 *
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 *
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 *
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 Fictionsizzles 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
As one reads his illuminatingStranger 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