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https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2024/12/in-search-of-a-new-20th-century-canon
In Stranger Than Fiction, Edwin Frank, the founder of New York Review of Books, seeks to tell the story of the modern novel through an eccentric, provoking list of 32 books. He describes his own modern canon, and, refreshingly, without worrying about what the academics might think. Frank worked for more than a decade on this book. He tells 'the story of the novel' in the 20th century, inspired by what Alex Ross did for 20th-century music in "The Rest Is Noise". Here is his canon of books:
| Notes from The Underground | Fyodor Dostoevsky |
| The Island of Doctor Moreau | H.G. Wells |
| The Immoralist | André Gide |
| The Other Side | Alfred Kubin |
| Amerika | Franz Kafka |
| Claudine at School | Colette |
| Kim | Rudyard Kipling |
| Three Lives | Gertrude Stein |
| Kokoro | Natsume Sōseki |
| The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas | Machado de Assis |
| The Magic Mountain | Thomas Mann |
| In Search of Lost Time | Marcel Proust |
| Ulysses | James Joyce |
| Mrs. Dalloway | Virginia Woolf |
| In Our Time | Ernest Hemingway |
| The Man Without Qualities | Robert Musil |
| Confessions of Zeno | Italo Svevo |
| Good Morning, Midnight | Jean Rhys |
| Sons and Lovers | D. H. Lawrence |
| The Rainbow | D. H. Lawrence |
| The End | Hans Erich Nossack |
| Life and Fate | Vasily Grossman |
| Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe |
| Artemisia | Anna Banti |
| Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov |
| Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison |
| One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel García Márquez |
| Life: A User’s Manual | Georges Perec |
| Memoirs of Hadrian | Marguerite Yourcena |
| History: A Novel | Elsa Morante |
| The Enigma of Arrival | V. S. Naipaul |
| Auterlitz | W. G. Sebald |
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