We here at The New Criterion are pleased to announce a series of special events to celebrate thirty years of publication.
The New Criterion, edited by Roger Kimball, has been a leading voice in America’s cultural life since its founding in 1982 by Hilton Kramer and the music critic Samuel Lipman. September 2011 marks the beginning of a season-long celebration of the magazine’s achievement on the occasion of its thirtieth year of publication.
To mark this important anniversary, The New Criterion will publish a special, expanded anniversary issue in September. The issue will feature contributions from many of the magazine’s most eminent contributors, including Joseph Epstein, Anthony Daniels, Michael Dirda, Alexander McCall Smith, Jay Nordlinger, James Panero, David Pryce-Jones, David Yezzi, Michael J. Lewis, Eric Ormsby, Roger Kimball, James Bowman, Karen Wilkin, and many others.
One essay from the September issue, by Victor Davis Hanson on the legacy of Pericles today, will inaugurate The New Criterion’s “Future Tense” essay series. Distinguished writers including Anthony Daniels, Andrew C. McCarthy, Charles Murray, Kevin D. Williamson, David Bentley Hart, and others will contribute to the “Future Tense” series. Encounter Books will publish their special essays in a collection called Future Tense: Lessons of Culture in an Age of Upheaval in the fall of 2012.
And, finally, The New Criterion will celebrate its thirtieth year with a series of special events during our 2011-2012 anniversary season, including a springtime gala (details to come).
Thirty years is an impressive milestone for any “little magazine”: T. S. Eliot’s Criterion, from which TNC takes its name and editorial inspiration, ran for only 17 years, from 1922-1939.
It is not only in terms of longevity that The New Criterion is impressive, however. What is really worth celebrating is the substance of the magazine: its impact on the most pressing issues in culture and the arts, and its incisive writing on painting, music dance, education, literature, media, theater, and other arts.
The New Criterion has maintained a unique position in championing the values of high modernism in an age of so-called “postmodernism.” Where else is one likely to find such regular acts of cultural recuperation as long essays for the non-academic reader on Plutarch, Mark Twain, Friedrich Hayek, Robert Frost, George Santayana, Elizabeth Bishop, just to name a very few from recent issues?
The magazine has also been home to several generations of poets, from established masters such as Donald Justice, W. D. Snodgrass, and Geoffrey Hill, to poets in mid career such as Mary Jo Salter, Rachel Hadas, and Brad Leithauser, to emerging talents like Adam Kirsch (whose first book, The Thousand Wells, won The New Criterion Poetry Prize), Alicia Stallings, and Ben Downing.
On the occasion of our twentieth anniversary, an editorialist for The Wall Street Journal said that The New Criterion “operates as a refuge for a civilizing element in short supply in contemporary America: honest criticism.” When our twenty-fifth anniversary came to pass, the London Telegraph described the magazine as “America’s leading review of the arts and intellectual life.” And as John O’Sullivan said of The New Criterion, “Quite simply, the best cultural review in the world.”
In its inaugural issue of September 1982, The New Criterion promised “to speak plainly and vigorously about the problems that beset the life of the arts and the life of the mind in our society.” This it has done for thirty years, with a verve and passion unequalled by any other publication.
A pdf of the September anniversary double-issue will be available on August 25th, and a print version will be available on September 1st.