Our New Librarian-in-Chief’s Favorite Children’s Book
Last week, Carla Hayden was sworn in as the 14th Librarian of Congress, making her the first woman and the first African-American in the position. Hayden talked with Jeffrey Brown…
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Amanda Hildebrand
75 posts
Amanda Hildebrand is a painter and writer based in Los Angeles. She Instagrams: @amandahilly.
Literary Loyalty, Sad Sequels, Sadder Fans
Loyalty seems to have no payoff for fans of every and any book that has ever had a sequel, because these next installments almost always disappoint—but why does it have…
Facing Reality in China’s “Ultra-Unreal” Literature
A literary movement aiming to express the surrealist daily life of modern China (a reality that can’t be captured by traditional genres like satire or horror) is giving the next…
Reviving Dominican Literature with “a Concert of Poetry”
Global Voices introduces us to El Hombrecito, a music group that interweaves Dominican poetry and visual art into their performances, in a story written by Natali Herrera Pacheco and translated…
Pura Belpré: New York’s First Puerto Rican Librarian
Pura Belpré began her long, luminous career as a librarian, storyteller, author, activist, and puppeteer when she moved to New York in 1921. Not only was Belpré NYC’s first Puerto…
“Our Parents Wouldn’t Let Us”: The Death of Liberal Arts
The liberal arts are shrinking fast on college campuses, and for one simple reason: parents don’t want their kids to have liberal arts degrees. For the Washington Post, Steven Pearlstein, Professor…
Shakespeare Didn’t Make up as Many Words as We Think
For the Guardian, Alison Flood writes on the bias of the Oxford English Dictionary towards “famous literary examples” instead of the actual origin, resulting in the incorrect attribution of several still-used words…
Dated Emcees by Chinaka Hodge
Amanda Hildebrand reviews Chinaka Hodge's Dated Emcees today in Rumpus Poetry.
Roald Dahl’s Hidden Village Home
Take a stroll through the storybook town of Great Missenden, a tiny village in the county of Buckinghamshire in Britain, and the home of children’s literature’s grand-wizard, Roald Dahl, in…
Bringing Diversity to the Comic Book Store World
Ariell Johnson, owner of Amalgam Comics and Coffeehouse in Philadelphia, is the East Coast’s first black female comic book store owner. For CNN, Ryan Bergeron talks with Johnson about opening up…
How to Survive as a Villain in Literature
On NPR’s All Things Considered, Petra Mayer offers advice to those who she describes as the “unpunished” villains of literature (O’Brien from Orwell’s 1984, X-Men’s Magneto, Milton’s Satan): win over the…
Everything as Disposable
I feel like everything shouldn’t exist. I think the way I manage is that I try to think of everything as disposable. I have no interest in posterity. Chris Randle…