Edwin Frank, the editorial director of the iconic New York Review Books and founder of its NYRB Classics series, is the author of a new book, “Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel.” Earlier this month, I wrote about the book and wanted to know more. So here Frank answers questions for the Book Pages Q&A.
Q. Please tell readers about your new book, “Stranger Than Fiction.”
My book is about how the novel changed over the last century, which was one of unprecedentedly rapid and extensive change, often disastrous. It takes a close look at some thirty unsettling and astonishing novels that both chart those changes and change the novel. One way of thinking about the book is to say it introduces the twentieth-century novel as a character in its own right. She changes over the years: she starts out in Edwardian garb; she ends up wearing a bomber jacket.
Q.You are the editorial director of the iconic and immediately recognizable New York Review Books and founder of its NYRB Classics series. Would you be willing to share a little about the work you do?
Like everybody these days, I mainly answer emails. Otherwise, I wait, patient as bird of prey, for something unexpectedly beautiful and wonderful to enter my field of vision. The readiness is all.
Q. Is there a book or books you always recommend to other readers?
From the Classics series, I am tireless in trying to get people to take a look at L.P. Myers’s “The Root and the Flower,” an almost psychedelic recreation of the India of Akbar the Great, which is also a map of the underground of the unhappy mind. Hungry ghosts patrol the public places and the private spaces of Myers’ imagined India. His protagonist achieves — or may — a Buddhist repose at the end. But at what cost?
Q. What are you reading now?
Right now I’m reading Henry James’s “The Bostonians.” I love Henry James, and this is his great book about America — America after the Civil War, its political, moral, and sexual imbroglios — which is to say America right now.
Q. Do you remember the first book that made an impact on you?
“The Lord of the Rings.” I was into heroes and my heroes were the heroic losers.
Q. Can you recall a book that felt like it was written with you in mind?
I enjoyed Vila-Matas’s “Bartleby & Co.” so much I distrusted it. A cocktail mixed perhaps too much for me?
Q. Do you have any favorite book covers?
The Penguin Modern Classics of the ’60s and ’70s, as designed by Germano Facetti, were models of spare, elegant modern design.
Q. What do you find the most appealing in a book: the plot, the language, the cover, a recommendation? Do you have any examples?
Oh, the language for sure. The energy of it, which may be at the level of the sentence but also a matter of paragraph, which is to say both. A paragraph is a wonderfully mysterious thing. There is also the lovely enigmatic space between authorial voice and the voice of the book, which can take on a character of its own, and the voice of its characters. In fiction’s great characters language walks out the door to make its way in the world.
Q. Do you have a favorite bookstore or bookstore experience?
When I was a kid the bookstore I haunted was called Brillig Works. I still keep one of the charming whimsical bookmarks they gave out framed on the wall.
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