Edwin Frank is the editorial director of New York Review of Books and founder of the NYRB Classics series. Instead of titling his book Stranger Than Fiction, Frank could have called it The Best Novels of the 20th Century because that’s pretty much what his book is all about.

Frank starts his review of great books of the past century by going back in time to 1864 because Frank claims “It is the beginning of 1864. Fyodor Dostoevsky is in Moscow writing the first twentieth-century novel.” (p. 3) From there, Frank takes a mostly chronological approach to the books he considers great and most influential.

While I’m not a big fan of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, I agree with Frank that Wells helps to create “genre fiction” with more successful novels like The Time Machine and War of the Worlds.

I struggled with chapters like “A world of literature: Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro” because I’m not familiar with those writers. But I had no problem grasping Frank’s analysis of “What did you do in the war? Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and James Joyce’s Ulysses.”

Here is a list of many of the novels Edwin Frank writes about in Stranger Than Fiction:

Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells

The Immortalist by Andre Gide 

The Other Side by Alfred Kubin

Amerika by Franz Kafka 

Colette’s Claudine at School

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

Three Lives by Gertrude Stein

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado De Assis

Kokoro by Natsume Soseki

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

Ulysses by James Joyce

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway 

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil 

Confesssions of Zeno by Italo Svevo

Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys

Sons and Lovers; The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence 

The End by Hans Erich Nossack

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

Artemisia by Anna Banti

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov

The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpenter 

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

How many of these books have you read? GRADE: A

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Introduction — xi

1. Prologue: the ellipsis: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground — 3
2. Part I. Breaking the vessels. 1. The vivisector: H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau — 29
3. 2. The abyss: André Gide’s The Immoralist — 46
4. 3. Shutter time: Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side and Franz Kafka’s Amerika — 62
5. 4. Youth and age: Collette’s Claudine at School and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim — 79
6. 5. The American sentence: Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives — 101
7. 6. A world of literature: Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro — 116
8. 7. Hippe’s pencil: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain — 142
9. 8. What did you do in the war? Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and James Joyce’s Ulysses — 160
10. Part II. A scattering of sparks. 9. For there she was: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dolloway — 191
11. 10. Nick stands up: Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time — 211
12. 11. Critic as creator: Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities — 226
13. 12. The human and the inhuman: Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno and Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight — 241
14. 13. The exception: D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow — 255
15. 14. The end: Hans Erich Nossack’s The End and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate — 280
16. Part III. The withdrawal. 15. Don’t cry: Anna Banti’s Artemesia and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart — 301
17. 16. Reflections on damaged life: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps — 317
18. 17. The whole story of America: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man — 334
19. 18. Boom: Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude — 351
20. 19. Into the abyss: Georges Perec’s Life a User’s Manual — 363
21. 20. Being historical: Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian and Elsa Morante’s History — 377
22. 21. The enigma of arrival: V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival — 394
23. Epilogue: W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz — 411
24. Appendix. Other lives of the twentieth-century novel — 421
25. Notes — 425
26. Bibliography — 429
27. Acknowledgements — 437
28. Index — 439