Recently, I picked up a book to distract myself from my phone, which was blowing up with social media alerts, election prognostications and sweaty-palmed predictions about who the Dodgers might sign for next season.
That book, “Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel,” lands in stores on Nov. 19, and it immediately pulled me in with its sobering, concise summation of the period: “That century brought world wars, revolutions, automobiles, women’s suffrage, death camps and the internet.”
With all that profound change, the jacket copy asked a question as pertinent now as for the previous century: “And for novelists, it posed an urgent question: How to write books as startling and unforeseen as the world we live in?”
Indeed.
In this work of nonfiction, which was 15 years in the making, author Edwin Frank, the editorial director of New York Review Books and founder of its NYRB Classics series, explores 20th-century novels through a personally chosen and idiosyncratic list of 32 titles (that makes allowances for Dostoevsky’s 1864 narrative “Notes From the Underground,” which presages the fiction of the coming century). Frank examines novels by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Chinua Achebe, Gabriel García Márquez, Ralph Ellison and W.G. Sebald among them. (And list lovers alert: He includes even more novels to consider in an appendix.)
In one passage in the introduction to “Stranger Than Fiction,” Frank addresses books about World War II, Hans Erich Nossack’s “The End,” which details the firebombing of Hamburg, and Vasily Grossman’s two tomes about the brutal Battle of Stalingrad, “Life and Fate” and “Stalingrad.” Referring to the challenge of writing about these cataclysmic events, he writes “…the imaginative resources of fiction struggle both to engage with and fight clear of unbearable fact.”
Unbearable facts may always be with us. Novels can be welcome distractions, searing indictments or innumerable other things, but the struggle to confront change remains ongoing. Frank’s searching study of the novel, what he calls the “story of an exploding form in an exploding world,” bursts with thought-provoking material, and I look forward to diving deeper into its chapters.
And maybe it’s useful to consider everything we’ve gone through thus far and think – even if it’s difficult to contemplate at times – that maybe we have what it takes to keep on going whether through the darkness or the light.
“How does it all end up?” asks Frank in his introduction.
Then, as now, it remains a good question.
What other books are coming out in November? Let’s take a look at 10 more.
Nov. 5
“Before We Forget Kindness” by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (Hanover Square)
Need something cozy and comforting right now? In the latest book of the “Before the Coffee Gets Cold” series, translated by Geoffrey Trousselot from the original Japanese, a fresh batch of characters seek healing or closure at Café Funiculi Funicula by sampling its time-traveling amenities.
“Bel Canto (Annotated Edition)” by Ann Patchett (Harper).
Patchett annotates her award-winning bestseller about a South American hostage situation that ensnares an opera singer, a Japanese businessman, terrorists and more. The author’s notes — criticizing an adverb here, revealing a character who “bores” her there – offer a welcome running commentary on the beloved novel.
Nov. 12
“Didion & Babitz” by Lili Anolik (Scribner)
My colleague Emily St. Martin, who has a story coming about this book and its
author, told me she’s obsessed with this lively work of nonfiction about two iconic Southern California writers and the Franklin Avenue scene of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Didion and Babitz’s opposites-attract friendship would ultimately repel them from each other; trust that the author shares all those details and more. As Anolik warns: “Reader, don’t be a baby.”
“Lazarus Man” by Richard Price (FSG)
Price, the author of such richly textured novels as “Lush Life,” “Clockers” and “The Whites” as well as indelible work in TV and film that includes “The Wire,” “The Color of Money,” and “The Night Of,” is back with a novel about a collapsing tenement in Harlem and the intertwining lives reacting in its wake.
“Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: A Celebration of Taylor Swift’s Musical Journey, Cultural Impact, and Reinvention of Pop Music for Swifties by a Swiftie” by Rob Sheffield (Dey Street)
Sheffield is one of the best writers about music and pop culture, and here he takes a complex look – just look at that subhead – at the work of Taylor Swift. As he proved with his terrific essay collection “Dreaming the Beatles,” Sheffield can be endlessly interesting as explores the work of the artists he admires.
“Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures” by Katherine Rundell (Doubleday)
Rundell just published her YA fantasy “Impossible Creatures” here in the States, and she’s already back with a new book of fantastical beasts – except these are real. Whether drawing connections between wombats and Italian painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti or Shakespeare and Greenland sharks, she fascinates.
“Shy Creatures” by Clare Chambers (Mariner)
Set in a 1960s-era psychiatric hospital, the novel features Helen, an unmarried art therapist carrying on a dreary affair with a married male colleague (who – red-flag – presses bleak novellas on her when she’d rather be reading Dorothy L. Sayers mysteries). Her life gets upended with the appearance of a wild-haired recluse who’s spent decades living hidden away with his aged aunt and turns out to be a talented artist.
Nov. 19
“Resist: How a Century of Young Black Activists Shaped America” by Rita Omokha (St. Martin’s)
Following the murder of George Floyd, which was captured on video by 17-year-old Darnella Frazier, award-winning journalist Rita Omokha traveled to 30 states to meet and speak with young Black activists and explore the past one hundred years of work done by younger people in the fight for social justice.
“The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America” by Stephanie Gorton (Ecco)
In the early part of the last century, two women were at the forefront of the campaign for reproductive rights and birth control access. Gorton’s book details how these leaders – Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, and Dennett, now largely forgotten – were often at odds and how that affected the movement.
“Gangster Hunters: How Hoover’s G-Men Vanquished America’s Deadliest Public Enemies” by John Oller (Dutton)
Oller’s book follows the action-packed exploits of 1930s-era FBI agents – who often lacked the experience, skills and equipment of their high-flying criminal counterparts – as the G-men chased down gangsters such as Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd.
