{"product_id":"stranger-than-fiction-lives-of-the-twentieth-century-novel","title":"Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eOne of the \u003ci\u003eWashington Post'\u003c\/i\u003es 50 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 A \u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review \u003c\/i\u003eEditors' Choice A \u003ci\u003eBoston Globe \u003c\/i\u003eBest Book of 2024\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\"Ambitious, intelligent, and happily unpretentious.\" \u003ci\u003e--\u003c\/i\u003eLouis Menand, \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"Convincing, idiosyncratic and often felicitous.\" \u003ci\u003e--\u003c\/i\u003eAlexandra Jacobs, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA legendary editor's reckoning with the twentieth-century novel and the urgent messages it sends.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\"How can we live differently?\" a young woman urgently demands in Virginia Woolf's novel \u003ci\u003eThe Years\u003c\/i\u003e. 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eImagine 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 \u003ci\u003eStranger Than Fiction\u003c\/i\u003e. 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 \u003ci\u003eNotes from Underground\u003c\/i\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eMrs. Dalloway, The Magic Mountain\u003c\/i\u003e, and\u003ci\u003e The Man Without Qualities\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe 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. \u003ci\u003eStranger Than Fiction \u003c\/i\u003eoffers 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.","brand":"Edwin Frank","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":46265614434540,"sku":"9780374270964","price":33.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":46265614467308,"sku":"9781250397836","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0684\/1791\/3068\/files\/9780374270964.jpg?v=1741998402","url":"https:\/\/intl.allstora.com\/products\/stranger-than-fiction-lives-of-the-twentieth-century-novel","provider":"Allstora","version":"1.0","type":"link"}