Episode Details

What should great fiction do for us?

That’s the question asked by Edwin Frank, editorial director of New York Review Books and author of Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel. 

Good books—and there were many written during the past hundred years—can entertain, just as they can give us pleasure. But great ones have the ‘power to breach,’ that is, to upset and provoke us, shattering our illusions about the world. 

On this episode, Frank speaks with Commonweal contributor and literary critic Tony Domestic about authors like Dostoevsy, Proust, and Virginia Woolf, among others.

For further reading:

• Fiction by Alice McDermott
• Mollie Wilson O’Reilly on George Eliot’s double life 
• Tony Domestico’s latest books column