Stranger Than Fiction: Edwin Frank w/ James Wood at 92NY

92NY Center for Culture & Arts hosts New York Review Books editorial director Edwin Frank and The New Yorker's James Wood for a discussion of twentieth-century literature and Frank's new book, Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

Frank, founder of the NYRB Classics series, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in October, here assembles a sweeping yet rigorous account of the 20th-century novel, a category so often taken for granted. From Virginia Woolf to V. S. Naipaul, Thomas Mann to Chinua Achebe, Gertrude Stein to Gabriel García Marquez, amid war, revolution, and the invention of automobiles, movies, and the internet, 20th century novelists aimed to create worlds as startling and unforeseen as the one they lived in. Stranger Than Fiction endeavors to tell their story.

"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 [. . .] Frank is interested [. . .] in the feel of certain books and writers, and he is adept at capsule characterizations."
—Louis Menand, The New Yorker.

This event takes place in-person and online. Tickets required.