The 10 Best Books of 2004
纽约时报的top ten，没有翻译过来的，不过关注一下也好，看看以后翻译过来的所谓畅销书，到底在不在上面，别动不动就雄踞畅销书排行榜一年之类的所谓翻译过来的书把我们吓唬倒了。^_^
he books we've chosen as the year's 10 best -- five novels, a short-story collection, a memoir, two biographies and a historical study -- present a broad range of voices and subjects. What do they have in common? Each is a triumph of storytelling, and each explores the past, whether through research, recollection, invention or some combination of the three.
Gilead
By MARILYNNE ROBINSON
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.
This grave, lucid, luminously spiritual novel about fathers and sons reaches back to the abolitionist movement and into the 1950's.
• Excerpt
The Master
By COLM TOIBIN
Scribner, $25.
A novel about Henry James, his life and art -- beautifully written, deeply pondered, startlingly un-Jamesian.
• Audio: Colm Toibin Discusses the Historical Novel
• Transcript: Colm Toibin on Henry James
• Excerpt
The Plot Against America
By PHILIP ROTH
Houghton Mifflin Company, $26.
An ingenious ''anti-historical'' novel set during World War II. Charles Lindbergh is elected president on an isolationist platform, and a Jewish family in Newark suffers the consequences.
• Featured Author: Philip Roth
• Excerpt
• Philip Roth on the Story Behind 'The Plot Against America'
• Join the Reading Group Discussion of 'The Plot Against America'
Runaway
By ALICE MUNRO
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.
Her 11th collection of short stories about people, often women living in rural Ontario, whose vivid, unremarkable lives are rendered with almost Tolstoyan resonance.
• Featured Author: Alice Munro
• Excerpt
Snow
By ORHAN PAMUK
Alfred A. Knopf, $26.
The forces of secular and Islamic Turkey collide in this prescient, complexly orchestrated novel, begun before 9/11 and completed shortly thereafter.
• An Interview With Orhan Pamuk
• Excerpt
War Trash
By HA JIN
Pantheon, $25.
A powerfully apposite moral fable whose suffering hero passes from delusion to clarity as a Chinese P.O.W. in Korea.
• Audio: An Interview With Ha Jin
• Text: An Interview With Ha Jin
Alexander Hamilton
By RON CHERNOW
The Penguin Press, $35.
An exemplary biography -- broad in scope, finely detailed -- of the founder who gave America capitalism and nationalism.
• Excerpt
Chronicles: Volume One
By BOB DYLAN
Simon & Schuster, $24.
A memoir -- idiosyncratic and revelatory -- by the peerless singer-songwriter who journeyed from the heartland to conquer the Greenwich Village music scene of the 1960's.
Washington's Crossing
By DAVID HACKETT FISCHER
Oxford University Press, $35.
An impressively researched narrative about the Revolutionary War that highlights the Battle of Trenton.
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
By STEPHEN GREENBLATT
W. W. Norton & Company, $26.95.
Scholarship, speculation and close reading combine in a lively study that gives shape to the life and context to the work.
