Dickens and Dostoevsky

The piano is eating up all my time tonight (remind me--why did I agree to be in a recital Sunday?), but I don't think you'll complain when you see what I have for you: a link to a story from the April 10 issue of the Times Literary Supplement wherein Eric Naiman takes last year's very strange kerfuffle over a purported meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky--noted in Claire Tomalin's biography and others--and starts pulling threads.

If I may engage in some wild, Friday night mixing of metaphors: the unraveling threads send Naiman down rabbit hole after rabbit hole into a world of fake names, fake citations, fake articles, and fake books, and even fake letters to the editor. I found it dizzying and deliciously entertaining, and I suspect that anyone even peripherally connected with academia--and its occasional log-rolling and insularity--will, at minimum, be amused.