Literary Significance & Criticism
According to Akunin, when the first Fandorin novel, The Winter Queen, was originally published in Russia in 1998, it sold only six thousand copies. The next three books sold similarly. However, Special Assignments, the fifth novel in the series, was "like a bomb", becoming a bestseller, making all the previous Fandorin novels bestsellers, and making Akunin a huge star in Russia.
Read more about this topic: Special Assignments
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or criticism:
“When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange that society should be disheartened and sensualized by unbelief.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“Homoeopathy is insignificant as an art of healing, but of great value as criticism on the hygeia or medical practice of the time.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)