Legendary Publisher Edwin Frank in Praise of Rudyard Kipling — and Why the 20th Century Novel Matters

Send us Fan MailNobel Laureate Rudyard Kipling is among the most derided of 20th century novelists, but in this episode of Shelf Life, the publishing legend Edwin Frank urges us to take a second look. As it happens, taking a second look was the impetus behind Frank's trailblazing publishing imprint, New York Review Books, built on the principle that too many great books had fallen out of print and deserved a second life. At my bookstore, One Grand Books, where titles are selected by celebrated bibliophiles there is hardly a shelf that does not contain an NYRB title, whether it’s CV Wedgwood’s The Thirty Years War, chosen by writer and thinker Ta-Nehisi Coates, In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcom, chosen by director and writer Mike White, or Balzac’s The Lilly in the Valley, chosen for us by director Francois Ozon. “I grew up between the pages of novels, and the better part of my adult life has been spent there, too,” Edwin Frank writes in the introduction to Stranger Than Fiction, his newly-published history of the 20th-century novel in which he explores, contextualizes, and interweaves the works of over 30 authors. We talk about Frank’s adventures in publishing, and what the 20th century novel can  teach us.