An immense, learned and witty sweep of literature by the editorial director of New York Review Books and the founder of the NYRB Classics series. Frank is terrific company through the century’s changing literary moods; it’s a telling sign that you end his book not only wanting to read (/re-read) almost all of the twentyish novels – a mixture of the canonical (Proust, Woolf, Nabokov) and the less predictable (Alfred Kubin, Yourcenar, Elsa Morante) – but also with a restored faith in the idea of the novel, which, admittedly, can waver at little these days.