Believing in Flannery O’Connor
• March 2009
One of the enduring novelists of the 20th Century was also, perhaps, its most religious.
9/11 and the Novelists
• December 2008
The national calamity has been food for neither the imagination nor the moral faculty of fiction writers.
This We're Supposed to Believe?
• Web Only
The new X-Files movie is an unintentionally hilarious mess--with juvenile and confused politics to boot!
Get Some
• Web Only
HBO's Iraq miniseries Generation Kill is brutal, bloody, hilarious, and real.
To This Day
• May 2008
The first seven chapters of S.Y. Agnon's novel "To This Day."
Free the Piano Player
• April 2008
The great pianists of the 19th century forged a musical golden age.
Going Highbrow at the CIA
• March 2008
Was it wise to fight the cultural battles of the cold war with witting and unwitting "front groups"?
The 2007 National Humanities Medal
• Web Only
Today, President Bush has awarded the National Humanities Medal to a number of important contributors to American intellectual life. We're delighted to say that five of the honorees have close ties with COMMENTARY: military historian Victor Davis Hanson, the novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick, Russia scholar Richard Pipes, Harvard professor of Yiddish literature Ruth R. Wisse, and Roger Hertog, a distinguished patron of the humanities and a longtime supporter of COMMENTARY. We've made available free of charge some of the major items written by the honorees.
Exclusive: Norman Podhoretz on Norman Mailer
• Web Only
Norman Mailer died last weekend at the age of 84. In 1999, COMMENTARY’s Editor at Large Norman Podhoretz published Ex-Friends, a memoir of his sundered friendships with some of the leading figures of New York’s literary intelligentsia, Mailer among them. Here, free of charge, is "A Foul-Weather Friend to Norman Mailer," the chapter on Mailer in Ex-Friends.
A Foul-Weather Friend to Norman Mailer
• Web Only
From Ex-Friends: Norman Podhoretz on Norman Mailer.
The Amateur as Critic
• November 2007
Can a cricket correspondent become a foremost writer on classical music? This one did.
Beyond the Musical Avant-Garde
• October 2007
A new critical history of the modernist movement hits the right notes.
Selling Classical Music
• September 2007
Of the challenges facing the new music director of the New York Philharmonic, staging outstanding concerts is the least.
At Home with "The Sopranos"
• July/August 2007
A fictional New Jersey mobster and us.
Utopians on Stage
• April 2007
Tom Stoppard's trilogy about Russian revolutionaries makes for an inconclusive politics but deeply affecting art.
