Posts by author
Amanda Hildebrand
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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 of PBS Newshour about the challenges of her new position,…
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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 to be this way? For Cultured Vultures, Nat Wassell gives…
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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 generation of Chinese authors the opportunity to subtly critique their…
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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 by Eleanor Weekes. El Hombrecito hopes to spark interest in…
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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 Rican librarian, Neda Ulaby reports for NPR, she was the…
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“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 of Public Affairs at George Mason University, writes about witnessing…
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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 and phrases to Shakespeare. Flood writes that there are multitudes…
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Dated Emcees by Chinaka Hodge
Amanda Hildebrand reviews Chinaka Hodge’s Dated Emcees today in Rumpus Poetry.
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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 the latter half of his life. For Hazlitt, Michael Hingston…
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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 the geek world to young black girls, bringing comic authors…
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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 audience with your cause and relatable personal faults, and you’ll…
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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 interviews author and artist Hannah Black for Hazlitt in the…