Stranger Than Fiction

One of the Washington Post’s 50 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 | A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice | A Boston Globe Best Book of 2024 “Ambitious, intelligent, and happily unpretentious.” —Louis Menand, The New Yorker “Convincing, idiosyncratic and often felicitous.” —Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book Review A legendary editor’s reckoning with the twentieth-century novel and the urgent messages it sends. “How can we live differently?” a young woman urgently demands in Virginia Woolf’s novel The Years. 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. Imagine the history of the twentieth-century novel recounted with the urgency and intimacy of a novel.