Posts by author
Amanda Hildebrand
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A Fictional Tyrant Come to Life
At the Washington Post, Carlos Lozada compares Donald Trump with the fictional dictators of two novels that seem to uncannily anticipate the rise of today’s foul-mouthed “politician.” Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America…
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Remembering the Boxing Poet
He flipped similes and metaphors like a battle rapper holding court in a cipher that was his and his alone. Even his jabs were like couplets that told you more about yourself than you could have ever hoped to know.…
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Not Even Rumi is Safe from Hollywood Whitewashing
One of the world’s most read and beloved poets since the 13th century, and an immensely important artistic, academic, and spiritual figure in the Muslim community, is getting his own movie. So who is going to take on the leading…
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Blame Harry Potter for Your Girlfriend Going Gone Girl
The then-girls, now-women who grew up reading Harry Potter are revitalizing the book market and steering publishing trends, and here’s what they want now: crime thriller fiction featuring calculating and vengeful female protagonists, now its own genre umbrella-ed by the…
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Self-Love Stew
In her essay at Hazlitt, “Watch Me Bathe,” Jess Carroll shares that she barely bathes, and tells us that it’s for the better—in fact, it’s like reverse self-love and self-care, as we’ve come to think of those terms now. She rejects…
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Giving Voice to the Homeless Writing Community
Boston-based literary magazine The Pilgrim was founded by journalist James Parker with the aim to bring the unheard voices of the homeless community to print while encouraging, teaching, and healing through the act of writing. At the Boston Globe, Zachary Jason takes…
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Save the Children
Graeme Whiting, headmaster of the Acorn School (motto: “Have courage for the truth”) of Nailsworth, Great Britain, recently published a blog post condemning “sensational” fantasy novels such as the Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Hunger Games series that…
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A Comic for Dreamers, the Lost, and the Lonely
Sometimes, you get lost. In art, in love, in fantasies-turned-dreams, in your five billion part-time jobs. Sophia Foster-Dimino combines daily minutia with drifting existential questions in her comic, “My Girl.” Read “My Girl” over at Electric Literature, and feel it right…
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Fairytales Still Make Our Skin Crawl
Fairytales can be seen as formulaic, but these formulas provide the bones for modern writers to fill in as they please; adaptations of classic fairytales are still making bestseller lists and hitting the box office every few months, showing how…
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Literature as Expression, Exchange, and Peace
Everything make sense if you’re an artist. At the Dallas Observer, Caroline North exchanged a few words with current US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, who is kicking off his second term with a book tour and several forthcoming projects, including…
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Ramona Quimby All Grown Up
Beverly Cleary guided generations of girls and boys alike through the rocky, messy, color- and dream-filled days of childhood with her long-running Ramona series, which manages to stay at the forefront of the children’s literary scene even fifty years after the…
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Mary Wept over Sex Worker’s Rights
At The Believer, Shannon Tien caught up with Chester Brown, graphic novelist and author of the newly released Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus, which Tien describes as “essentially a layman’s interpretation of the Bible.” Mary Wept is a collection…