12-28-2004, 08:22 PM
The 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.
FICTION
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
NONFICTION
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.
A student of ICMAP.