Best books of 2004
Discover the best books of 2004 with our curated list of top-rated titles across genres. Find must-read fiction, non-fiction, and award-winning picks from 2004!
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Mardi Gras in the Moment
by Jason Bentsman
The world has waited decades for a new anti-hero in American fiction, a character who prophesizes the pettiness of American social life at the beginning of the twenty-first century. With Conrad Greyman, a social visionary arrives to illuminate the inequities and shallowness of our social lives now, as the Beats did for their generation.In a musty dorm room at an elite college in upstate New York sleeps Conrad Greyman. He sleeps all the time, in fact. Conrad is a casualty of postmodern malaise and bears hidden wounds he doesnt understand.Mardi Gras tells the fantastic story of Conrads spontaneous trip to the great Southern festival. He finds there, amid the infernal chaos of neon lights and Bourbon, a chance for unlikely redemption. Conrads journey through the mad streets of New Orleans becomes a modern hero-quest, and New Orleans an epic landscape. Conrads adventure is populated by holy fools who come to his aid, menacing frat boys, magical beads, and unadulterated American decadence. In the balance hangs the fate of an inward-looking soul trying to make his way through a fractured, carnivalistic world.
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The Plot Against America
by Philip Roth
In this alternate history, Pulitzer Prize winner Roth considers what it would be like for his Newark family--and for a million such families all over the country--during the menacing years of a Charles Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be Jews would have every reason to expect the worst.
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Alexander Hamilton
by Ron Chernow
The #1 New York Times bestseller, and the inspiration for the hit Broadway musical Hamilton! Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Chernow presents a landmark biography of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father who galvanized, inspired, scandalized, and shaped the newborn nation. "Grand-scale biography at its best—thorough, insightful, consistently fair, and superbly written . . . A genuinely great book." —David McCullough “A robust full-length portrait, in my view the best ever written, of the most brilliant, charismatic and dangerous founder of them all." —Joseph Ellis Few figures in American history have been more hotly debated or more grossly misunderstood than Alexander Hamilton. Chernow’s biography gives Hamilton his due and sets the record straight, deftly illustrating that the political and economic greatness of today’s America is the result of Hamilton’s countless sacrifices to champion ideas that were often wildly disputed during his time. “To repudiate his legacy,” Chernow writes, “is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.” Chernow here recounts Hamilton’s turbulent life: an illegitimate, largely self-taught orphan from the Caribbean, he came out of nowhere to take America by storm, rising to become George Washington’s aide-de-camp in the Continental Army, coauthoring The Federalist Papers, founding the Bank of New York, leading the Federalist Party, and becoming the first Treasury Secretary of the United States.Historians have long told the story of America’s birth as the triumph of Jefferson’s democratic ideals over the aristocratic intentions of Hamilton. Chernow presents an entirely different man, whose legendary ambitions were motivated not merely by self-interest but by passionate patriotism and a stubborn will to build the foundations of American prosperity and power. His is a Hamilton far more human than we’ve encountered before—from his shame about his birth to his fiery aspirations, from his intimate relationships with childhood friends to his titanic feuds with Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Monroe, and Burr, and from his highly public affair with Maria Reynolds to his loving marriage to his loyal wife Eliza. And never before has there been a more vivid account of Hamilton’s famous and mysterious death in a duel with Aaron Burr in July of 1804. Chernow’s biography is not just a portrait of Hamilton, but the story of America’s birth seen through its most central figure. At a critical time to look back to our roots, Alexander Hamilton will remind readers of the purpose of our institutions and our heritage as Americans. 9780143034759
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Runaway
by Alice Munro
A collection of short fiction captures the lives of women of all ages and circumstances, as they deal with the limits and lies of passion, unfulfilled dreams, motherhood, betrayal, and the bonds of love.
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Snow
by Orhan Pamuk
After years of lonely political exile, Turkish poet Ka returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral and learns about a series of suicides among pious girls forbidden to wear headscarves.
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ID: 0195170342
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Will in the World
by Stephen Greenblatt
A portrait of Elizabethan England and how it contributed to the making of William Shakespeare discusses how he moved to London lacking money, connections, and a formal education and rose to became his age's foremost playwright.
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Line of Beauty
by Alan Hollinghurst
Moving into the attic room in the Notting Hill home of the wealthy, politically connected Fedden family in 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest becomes caught up in the rising fortunes of this glamorous family and finds his own life forever altered by his association during the boom years of the 1980s. By the author of The Swimming-Pool Library. 30,000 first printing.
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Cloud Atlas
by David Stephen Mitchell
Recounts the connected stories of people from the past and the distant future, from a nineteenth-century notary and an investigative journalist in the 1970s to a young man who searches for meaning in a post-apocalyptic world.
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The Fabric of the Cosmos
by Brian Greene
From one of the world's leading physicists comes a grand tour of the universe that makes readers look at space, time, and the texture of reality in a completely different way. 146 illustrations.