Best of 2017: The Critics

Riccaardo Vecchio, "Bill Knott" (2017)

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2017 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. James Wood, “The Other Side of Silence,” June 5 & 12, 2017 (“What animates his project is the task of saving the dead, retrieving them through representation”).

2. James Wood, “All Over Town,” November 27, 2017 (“In ‘The Waves,’ Woolf returns, at regular intervals, to painterly, almost ritualized descriptions of the sun’s passage, on a single day, from dawn to dusk: wedges of prose like the divisions on a sundial”).

3. Alex Ross, “Tank Music,” July 24, 2017 (“Gusts buffeting the exterior created an apocalyptic bass rumble; lashes of rain sounded like a hundred snare drums”).

4. Peter Schjeldahl, “Full Immersion,” July 31, 2017 (“Cradled in a hammock the other day, I couldn’t imagine anywhere in the world I would rather be, tracking subtle variations in the changing slides: for example, a matchbook first closed, then open, then burning, then, finally, burned”).

5. Dan Chiasson, “The Fugitive,” April 3, 2017 (“He is, at his best, a poet of home-brewed koans, threading his philosophical paradoxes into scenes of slacker glamour”).

6. Claudia Roth Pierpont, “The Island Within,” March 6, 2017 (“Bishop, who complained of the ‘egocentricity’ of a confessional poet like Sexton, found deliverance in gazing steadily outward”).

7. Anthony Lane, “Pretty and Gritty,” March 27, 2017 (“ ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is delectably done; when it’s over, though, and when the spell is snapped, it melts away, like cotton candy on the tongue”).

8. Adam Kirsch, “Pole Apart,” May 29, 2017 (“But, where Eliot often used this kind of moral X-ray vision to express contempt and disgust for the world, Milosz had seen too much death to find skulls profound”).

9. Adam Gopnik, “A New Man,” July 3, 2017 (“The stoical stance and the sensual touch: that was Hemingway’s keynote emotion, and his claim to have learned it from Cézanne looks just”).

10. Leo Robson, “The Mariner’s Prayer,” November 20, 2017 (“If irony exists to suggest that there’s more to things than meets the eye, Conrad further insists that, when we pay close enough attention, the “more” can be endless”).

11. Louis Menand, “The Stone Guest,” August 28, 2017 (“Crews is an attractively uncluttered stylist, and he has an amazing story to tell, but his criticism of Freud is relentless to the point of monomania”).

12. Emily Nussbaum, “Tragedy Plus Time,” January 23, 2017 (“Despite the breeziness of Breitbart’s description, there was in fact a global army of trolls, not unlike the ones shown on ‘South Park,’ who were eagerly ‘shit-posting’ on Trump’s behalf, their harassment an anonymous version of the ‘rat-fucking’ that used to be the province of paid fixers”).

Best of 2017: newyorker.com

Christoph Niemann, "Kosciuszko Bridge" (2017)

Here are my favorite newyorker.com posts of 2017 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Ethan Iverson, “Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, and One Night in New York City,” August 17, 2017 (“Playing with Coltrane, Ellington’s ‘new-style’ arrangement had a mournful raindrop piano part that was dramatic and distinctive. At the Rainbow Grill, Ellington doesn’t play many of the raindrops but goes all out in rhapsodic style: heavy block chords, cascades, even a long left-hand trill underneath pointillistic right-hand stabs”).

2. Richard Brody, “Agnès Varda and JR’s Faces Places Honors Ordinary People on a Heroic Scale,” October 10, 2017 (““One of the movie’s most powerful sequences slips from the aforementioned goat mural to Varda’s own photograph of a dead goat from the start of her career, in 1954. It leads both to her extended recollection of one of her models, the late Guy Bourdin, himself a photographer, whom she commemorates with a visit to his house, another to the site of one of their photographs, and to an extraordinary, calculatedly ephemeral mural of him by JR that’s washed away with the tides”).

3. Christoph Niemann, “Under the Kosciuszko Bridge,” September 20, 2017 (“It was around noon on a Wednesday morning. The atmosphere was peaceful: half-empty parking lots, fences, warehouses, strange factories, strings of unkempt wires, and the odd traffic cone adding a touch of color”).

4. Philip Gefter, “Sex and Longing in Larry Sultan’s California Suburbs,” April 9, 2017 (“Whenever I walked down the boardwalk and entered his house, I was reminded of the light in his pictures; this is where he honed his precision-cut insight”).

5. Charlotte Mendelson, “In Praise of Autumn’s Rotting Beauty,” November 8, 2017 (“And, at this time of year, when even the most ordinary vine leaf is pink-spotted, when a simple Cox’s Orange Pippin apple is striped and freckled as a Paul Klee landscape, it’s extraordinary that I ever make it down the street”).

6. Jessamyn Hatcher, “The Ardent Followers of A Détache,” August 7, 2017 (“A box of knitwear samples had arrived from a factory in Peru, and Kowalska was trying to figure out whether a pair of wool culottes in UPS brown would work on the runway with shrimp-pink alpaca-lined clogs”).

7. Andrea K. Scott, “Calling All Eye-Rollers: An Undeniable David Hockney Show at the Met,” December 10, 2017 (“But for all his interest in optic technologies—he makes digital drawings on iPads, a selection of which concludes the Met’s show—Hockney’s thoughts always encircle painting. How acrylic can be thinned to soak into canvas and mimic the blue translucence of water, or how it can be brushed onto a surface in undulating cream-and-gray strokes to convey the plushness of a shag rug underfoot. Sensations—visual, tactile, emotional—are the heart of his project”).

8. Morgan Meis, “Charles McGee’s Vibrant Art and the Beauty of Detroit,” July 22, 2017 (“Recently, I spent an afternoon with the artist Charles McGee, at his home in Rosedale Park, a neighborhood in northwest Detroit. I was trying to understand the thinking behind his new mural downtown, titled “Unity,” which is a hundred and eighteen feet high and fifty feet wide, and which, as of May 31st, can be found on the side of a thirteen-story building at 28 West Grand River Avenue”).

9. Benjamin Hedin, “The Radical Criticism of William Gass,” December 8, 2017 (“Works of prose, he insisted, were not mirrors; they did not show us life. He called sentences ‘containers of consciousness,’ and the consciousness he meant was not mine, or yours, or even the author’s. It belonged to the book alone”).

10. Richard Brody, “What to Stream this Weekend: Seaside Frolics,” August 18, 2017 (“Shot by shot, line by line, moment by moment, Varda rescues the vitality and the beauty of the incidental, the haphazard, the easily overlooked—because she fills each detail with the ardent energy of her own exquisite sensibility”).

Best of 2017: Photos

 Mauricio Lima, "Women and Children Mourning the Death of Two Kurdish Soldiers" (2017)

Here are my favorite New Yorker photographs of 2017:

1. Mauricio Lima’s “Women and Children Mourning the Death of Two Kurdish Soldiers,” for Luke Mogelson’s “Dark Victory” (November 6, 2017).

2. Mauricio Lima’s “Female Fighters for the Syrian Democratic Forces," for Luke Mogelson’s “Dark Victory” (November 6, 2017).

3. Thomas Prior’s “Irad and Jose Ortiz,” for John Seabrook’s “Top Jocks” (December 4, 2017).

4. William Mebane’s “Tim Ho Wan,” for Jiayang Fan’s “Tables For Two: Tim Ho Wan” (April 17, 2017).

5. Victor J. Blue’s “Captain Basam Attallah Shoots at a Cache of ISIS Explosives,” for Luke Mogelson’s “The Avengers of Mosul” (February 6, 2017).

6. Daniel Shea’s “Peter Doig,” for Calvin Tomkins’s “Somewhere Different” (December 11, 2017).

7. Nadine Ijewere’s “Lynette Yiadom-Boakye,” for Zadie Smith’s “A Bird of Few Words” (June 19, 2017).

8. Dina Litovsky’s “Phil Young,” for Nicolas Niarchos’s “Tables For Two: Lenox Saphire” (January 2, 2017).

9. Nadav Kander’s “Julian Assange,” for Raffi Khatchadourian’s “Man Without a Country” (August 21, 2017).

10. Amy Lombard’s “Sexy Taco/Dirty Cash,” for Nicolas Niarchos’s “Tables For Two: Sexy Taco/Dirty Cash” (February 6, 2017).

Best of 2017: Talk

Tom Bachtell, "Michel Houellebecq" (2017)

Here are my favorite “Talk of the Town” stories of 2017:

1. Nick Paumgarten, “Bong Show,” May 15, 2017 (“One object widely admired by the other lampworkers was a pea-green monster truck with big black tires and flames exuding from six tailpipes—every inch of it glass”).

2. Ian Frazier, “Extra Credit,” August 7 & 14, 2017 [“On exhibit were a palm-leaf book the size of a sheaf of paint samples, a big ball of raw rubber from a rubber tree (one of Sri Lanka’s resources), boxes of Ceylon tea (“We have the best, best tea”), a large stone grinder for spices (“Sri Lankan women were strong, back in the day”), her grandmother’s sitar, a replica of a seated Buddha considered to be the fifth-greatest statue in the world, and a statue of the fasting Buddha (“For six years, he ate no food and never opened his eyes”) that was made of welded iron”].

3. Robert Sullivan, “Facing History,” June 19, 2017 (“At Goodfellows, a barbershop on Fourth Avenue, people knew the church but not the tree. ‘In the North? That seems strange,’ a customer said”).

4. Lauren Collins, “Sideline,” June 19, 2017 (“He must have been chewing on his cigarette, because it hung from his mouth like a broken limb”).

5. Tad Friend, “Pulverizer,” June 19, 2017 (“Slugging down the rest of his soda, he continued, ‘I had an acting teacher who told me, “Michael, there are two types of actors: those who act with their ass”—squirmy Richard Dreyfuss types—“and those who act with their balls.” ’ His eyes got moist. ‘On this movie I got down on my knees and prayed before takes, and then just grabbed my balls and tried somehow to be of service’ ”).

6. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Incidents,” June 19, 2017 (“In front of him, a set of stairs led up to a rectangular opening cut into a wall. Beyond the opening was an empty chamber. Lights installed in the walls of the chamber were making it glow different shades—first fuchsia, then baby blue, then electric yellow. Everything outside the chamber also kept changing color, including Turrell”).

7. Nick Paumgarten, “Good Taste,” November 27, 2017 (“His top-of-the-line loudspeaker system, at three hundred and forty thousand dollars (no wonder we settle), is the Imperia: two seven-foot steel towers, each with a couple of huge flared wooden horns, one atop another, along with some smaller aluminum-alloy horns. Between them, on the floor, are the boxed bass horns. The standing horns, fashioned out of Pennsylvania ash, bring to mind an old gramophone, or a morning glory. They make it sound as if the musicians are in the room”).

8. Anna Russell, “Odds and Ends,” November 6, 2017 (“ ‘I like ordinary objects,’ Oldenburg said. ‘If you have one object meet some other object, which claims to be ordinary, then you’d have something even more extraordinary.’ He moved to another shelf. ‘That’s a bottle, that’s a piece of an automobile tire, and this”—he pointed to a brown globule—‘is obviously something coming out of a tube’ ”).

Best of 2017: Illustrations

Bendik Kaltenborn, "RJD2" (2017)

Here are my favorite New Yorker illustrations of 2017:

1. Bendik Kaltenborn’s “RJD2,” for Matthew Trammell’s “Night Life: New Routes” (January 9, 2017).

2. Riccardo Vecchio’s “Bill Knott,” for Dan Chiasson’s “The Fugitive” (April 3, 2017).

3. Riccardo Vecchio’s “Fernando Pessoa,” for Adam Kirsch’s “Voices from the Void” (September 4, 2017).

4. Edward Sorel’s “Sketchbook: Whack Jobs” (September 11, 2017).

5. Andrea Ventura’s “Jenny Erpenbeck,” for James Wood’s “Strangers Among Us” (September 25, 2017).

6. Bob Staake’s “Philip Kerr,” for Jane Kramer’s “The Plot Thickens” (July 10 & 17, 2017).

7. Tom Bachtell’s “Michel Houellebecq,” for Lauren Collins’ “Sideline” (June 19, 2017).

8. Vincent Mahé’s “The Tank,” for Alex Ross’s “Tank Music” (July 24, 2017).

9. Gizem Vural’s “L. A. Rhapsody,” for Alex Ross’s “Classical Music: L. A. Rhapsody” (March 20, 2017).

10. Byron Eggenschwiler’s “The Dead,” for Hilton Als’s “Memento Mori” (December 4, 2017).