The Novels That Made Us

If there is any cultural and intellectual institution today that has the sanctity of the old New Yorker, it’s the New York Review Books Classics series, conceived of and edited by Edwin Frank. NYRB Classics rescues out-of-print masterpieces, especially those in translation, that have been dropped by big commercial publishers who can’t appreciate them, and presents them in visually iconic new editions to bookish insiders. I’m center mass for NYRB Classics: I’ve never read one I didn’t love, and have long struggled to draw on books by any other publisher for my cooking-from-literature column for the Paris Review (a rough count shows that it’s about 1 in 7). For me, NYRB Classics are the ultimate pleasure-read, striking just the right balance of challenge to entertainment. Thus, the publication of Stranger Than Fiction: The Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, a book written by the legendary Edwin Frank, is something of a tablets-of-Moses moment.