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”).