Stranger Than Fiction

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. The scene is set in the 1930s, war and death are in the air, but the question was asked again and again in the course of a century when 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 Fic