After decades of acquiring novels as an editor, Edwin Frank has finally written a book about the novel: his nonfiction debut examines that most dominant of literary forms in its many 20th-century manifestations, tracking its evolution and influence.
“Mainly, we’ve been talking about the novel from a kind of formalist point of view in a way, or as an individual expression—an individual sense of hope,” says Frank, the founder and editorial director of New York Review Books, sitting at the back of a Greenwich Avenue enoteca. “But I’m also very interested in the novel in relation to history, and certainly have been in my life as an editor.”
Frank established the book publishing division of the New York Review of Books 25 years ago, and at 64, he looks the part of an archetypal book editor, or one prevailing idea of it: slight and clean of pate, with round tortoiseshell glasses. He leans back in his chair with a lager, the sleeves of his striped button-down rolled to the elbows. “I’m interested to some extent in seeing how one thing leads to another. I think it’s a useful fiction, editorially, to work on: what are the echoes and resonances going back and forth between books and places and times?”
Many of those echoes and resonances are felt in Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel (FSG, Nov.). Frank’s book traces through lines of craft and theme across 33 novels, beginning with a prelude on Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), and ending with a postlude on W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001). In case that isn’t enough, an appendix lists more than 90 other novels he considered for inclusion but ultimately omitted.
If Frank is disappointed that NYRB has published just two of the novels he examines in his book, that disappointment is misplaced. Any publisher to put out both Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate has a backlist to brag about—and would make a compelling party guest.
Frank would know. He’s been at the center of a kind of literary celebration since he launched NYRB with 10 paperback reissues—of works by Anton Chekhov, Julio Cortázar, and Henry James, among others—as part of a series called NYRB Classics. Since then, the imprint has released more than 750 new editions of overlooked, out-of-print, or untranslated books by such titans as Gabriel García Márquez, André Gide, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Natsume Sōseki, and H.G. Wells, all of whom find their way into Stranger Than Fiction.
The overlap wasn’t exactly deliberate, but it’s also not a coincidence. “I would never have written this book if I had not done the work that I do,” Frank says. “I’d never written anything of a comparable scale. I had to figure out what kind of book it would be.”
The kind of book it became is, like its author, accomplished and erudite—both comprehensive and tightly focused in its historical and literary exegesis. The initial idea for Stranger Than Fiction, Frank says, came to him after reading New Yorker music critic Alex Ross’s 2007 book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century. As Frank writes in the introduction to Stranger Than Fiction, “Ross’s book told the story of modern classical music in light of the 20th century’s political, social, and technological upheavals.”
The Rest Is Noise prompted Frank to consider a question, could the same thing be done with the novel? Answering that question took him 15 years, but finding it took a lifetime. Born in Colorado in 1960 to two academics, Frank was raised mostly in Boulder, where “there were a lot of books in the house.” He also benefited, he says, from his parents’ academic travel, “exchanges and so on—my parents could have a year in France, a year in England.”
It was on those travels that the seeds of both NYRB Classics and Stranger Than Fiction were sown. “I got a sense of the different ways books appeared, as well as the different books there were,” Frank says. “The year we were in England, seeing the Penguin Modern Classics of those days—in a way, Penguin served as a kind of reading list you can just keep going back to.”
Stranger Than Fiction is not Frank’s first book—he’s published a poetry collection, Snake Train: Poems 1984–2013 (2015), along with some chapbooks—but it is his first book of prose, and one that proved quite the undertaking. During its gestation, the book had three editors. It was acquired in 2009 by Jonathan Galassi, with Lorin Stein set to edit before he left FSG for the Paris Review. Ultimately, the title landed with Alex Star, a senior editor at FSG and former senior editor at the New York Times Book Review.
“Working with a fellow editor of Edwin’s caliber was a rare treat—and an education,” Star says, adding that editing Stranger Than Fiction inspired him to read many of the books Frank addresses. “I was motivated not by editorial diligence but by an instinctive response to Edwin’s approach: each chapter stages an encounter between remarkable books and a remarkable reader, without the props of received critical opinion. There’s an excitement and drama to the action, and when it’s over, you have a livelier, more acute appreciation of what the literature of any century can achieve.”
That excitement and drama is something Frank sees in the novel itself. “At times,” he writes in the book’s introduction, “I have thought of the twentieth-century novel as a fictional character in its own right and of this book as an old-fashioned picaresque, full of scrapes and capers, scares and narrow escapes, till at some point sightings of our protagonist become infrequent. She has no more news for us.”
Stranger Than Fiction is not principally concerned with what is canonical but with what is influential, remarkable, and representative. And maybe it’s here that Frank’s work as an author and editor overlap most clearly: NYRB Classics is, after all, something of a canon of the noncanonical. In the book, Frank deliberately analyzes lesser works by the likes of Franz Kafka (Amerika), Gertrude Stein (Three Lives), and Ernest Hemingway (In Our Time), alongside such catholically acknowledged masterpieces as Ulysses and One Hundred Years of Solitude.
In choosing titles for inclusion, Frank says he prized the way each could be related to the others he considers, so that there is “something of a kind of organic structure”—that sense of one thing leading to another thing. As to viewing a literary canon today, he says, “Ideally, issues of quality are still taken seriously, but the issues of where and what and who and so on are also at play. Throughout the last century, a lot of lived experience which had not found representation or had been unspeakable or dismissed found its way to the world at large. And it found its way by taking seriously questions of literary form, and of what a novel can be.”
This article has been updated for clarity.
