Toward the end of her 2008 essay “Two Paths for the Novel,” on the schism in contemporary literature between realism and conceptual fiction, Zadie Smith lists a few authors to be found in the middle. “At their crossroads,” she writes, “we find extraordinary writers claimed by both sides: Melville, Conrad, Kafka, Beckett, Joyce, Nabokov.”
Edwin Frank’s new book, Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the 20th Century Novel, is devoted to 30 such writers at the crossroads. His argument is that the 20th century saw the rise of a new kind of fiction that split with the 19th-century novel with its finely tuned plots and balanced casts of heroes and villains.
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