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:
“It is a good lesson—though it may often be a hard one—for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world’s dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of all significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)
“The hysterical find too much significance in things. The depressed find too little.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)