How long did it take Dostoevsky to go from being heralded as the “heir of Gogol” to being denounced as a “bad joke”? 15 days. Apparently he never recovered.
Dostoevsky’s Fall from Grace
Artistic Dachshunds
On the NY Daily News’ Page Views blog, Alexander Nazaryan writes about the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show’s most neglected — yet also most literary — member breed: the dachshund. “No dog,” Nazaryan writes, “has been more widely loved by writers and artists than the dachshund.” Comedian Streeter Seidell agrees that the dachshund was slighted, and calls for a “fan favorite” award next year.
From Abkhazia to Zimbabwe
“[W]e can confirm that there is no place on Earth (not even Antarctica) that literature isn’t written.” Michael Barron, the U.S. literary editor for Culture Trip, curates “The Global Anthology,” an online project showcasing more than 220 pieces of literature from all over the world written in or translated into English (via Moby Lives).
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Medium Vice
Year in Reading alum Maud Newton has a new short story up on Medium. Titled “Nobody’s Stranger,” the “Miami noir love story” somewhat wonderfully features a bar, “the most incongruous bar in Little Haiti,” in which the patrons are mostly “aging emo kids and British soccer fans and overweight burlesque enthusiasts.”
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Philosophy’s Monster
Frankenstein was originally a philosophical novel, Michael Saler reveals in his review of The Annotated Frankenstein. Mary Shelley used her monster to comment on the terrors of the French Revolution, patriarchy, social justice, and slavery, he writes.
Hazlitt, will publish.
Random House Canada launched a new website yesterday, and a new internet magazine to go along with it. There’s a piece from Hari Kunzru on Werner Herzog, and I’m especially taken with this one from Emily Landau on Christopher Hitchens and David Rakoff.