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3 weeks ago | 
freebeacon.com | Micah Mattix
"When conservatives discuss novels," Christopher Scalia complains in his entertaining and useful 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read), "we tend to mention the same handful of works. We cherish a reliable and sturdy stock that hasn’t been replenished in a generation or two"—a stock that includes The Lord of the Rings, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, and, heaven help us, Atlas Shrugged. It shouldn’t be that way. Conservatives should be widely read literary people.
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4 weeks ago | 
firstthings.com | Micah Mattix
In a recent talk at the American Enterprise Institute, Dana Gioia remarked that “in the past half century, American conservatism has retreated from artistic culture.” He traces that retreat and notes:By the year 2000, rightly or wrongly, conservatives became associated with defunding, censorship, restriction, and complaint. The right seemed to be banning novels instead of writing them. It banned artwork rather than creating new visions of beauty that spoke more potently.
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Mar 30, 2025 | 
conservativereview.com | Micah Mattix
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Mar 30, 2025 | 
freebeacon.com | Micah Mattix
Few American writers are as intriguing as Edgar Allan Poe. The author of stories that are still shockingly violent, Poe himself was something of a Jekyll and Hyde—sensitive and kind when sober, but manic and violent when drunk—who lived much of his life in debt after being raised by one of Richmond's richest families. Some of the more salacious details of his life are widely known.
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Mar 21, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Micah Mattix
Select an AuthorAbel, LionelAbowitz, RichardAdams, HarryAdams, J.
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Dec 12, 2024 | 
washingtonexaminer.com | Micah Mattix
I rise in the middle of the night, go outdoors at sunrise, but both in the fields and at home I study, think, read, and write … Every day I wander over the rocky mountains, through the dewy valleys and caverns … Meanwhile here I have established my Rome, my Athens, and my spiritual fatherland; here I gather all the friends I now have or did have … I marvel at their accomplishments and their spirits … conversing with them more willingly than with those who think they are alive … I thus wander...
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Nov 28, 2024 | 
washingtonexaminer.com | Micah Mattix
The original Gladiator is Ridley Scott’s magnum opus and remains one of the best films since the turn of the century. The script, despite being written on the fly, had great lines. Everyone old enough to have watched the original remembers “Are you not entertained?” and “What we do in life echoes in eternity.” These were delivered by a Russell Crowe in his prime — charming, sensitive, and as hard as nails.
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
prufrock.substack.com | Micah Mattix
Dean Kissick’s essay in the latest issue of Harper’s starts with the wildest lede you’re likely to read this year:My mother lost both of her legs on the way to the Barbican Art Gallery. It was her day off, and she was going there to see an exhibition called Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art. She had just arrived in London on a coach from Oxford and was run over by a bus outside Victoria Station. This was on a Friday morning in early May.
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
wng.org | Micah Mattix
The Brothers Grimm are the world’s most famous folklorists. Their Children’s and Household Tales never sold well during their lifetimes, but it made them—not Martin Luther or Franz Kafka—the most widely translated German authors of all time. It contains those tales we all know so well (or think we do)—“Snow White,” “Cinderella,” and “Rapunzel”—as well as lesser-known ones like “The Hand With a Knife,” about a girl who cuts peat with a magic knife.
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Aug 24, 2024 | 
freebeacon.com | Micah Mattix
It is not wrong to say that America made C.S. Lewis. Lewis’s 1942 book The Screwtape Letters was popular in Britain but was initially rejected by American publishers until Macmillan took a chance on it in 1943. It was a huge success. Macmillan quickly brought out his The Problem of Pain and The Case for Christianity (collecting Lewis’s popular BBC talks), as well as his sci-fi novel Out of the Silent Planet. Lewis was put on the cover of Time in 1947.
