Mid-Year Top Ten (2011)

A dazzling river of New Yorkers flows through this blog – twenty-six so far this year – and since we’re now half way through 2011, it’s as good a time as any to pause, look back, and pluck a few favorites from the magazine’s exhilarating current of prose. Here’s my “Mid-Year Top Ten New Yorker Stories for 2011”:

1. David Grann’s “A Murder Foretold” (April 4, 2011)
2. Elif Batuman’s “The View from the Stands” (March 7, 2011)
3. Philip Gourevitch’s “Climbers” (July 11 & 18, 2011)
4. Ian Frazier’s “Back to the Harbor” (March 21, 2011)
5. Raffi Khatchadourian’s “The Gulf War” (March 14, 2011)
6. Geoff Dyer’s “Poles Apart” (April 18, 2011)
7. Mike Peed’s “We Have No Bananas” (January 10, 2011)
8. Jeffrey Toobin’s “Madoff’s Curveball” (May 30, 2011)
9. Keith Gessen’s “Nowheresville” (April 18, 2011)
10. Gabrielle Hamilton’s “The Lamb Roast” (January 17, 2011)

Credit: The above artwork is by Laurent Cilluffo; it appears in the May 16, 2011 issue of The New Yorker as an illustration for "On The Horizon."