Best Books of 2004
Discover the best books of 2004 with our curated list of top-rated titles across genres. Find must-read fiction, nonfiction, and award-winning picks from this iconic year in literature.
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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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I Am Charlotte Simmons
by Tom Wolfe
At Dupont University, an innocent college freshman named Charlotte Simmons learns that her intellect alone will not help her survive.
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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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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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Little Children
by Tom Perrotta
A group of young suburban parents, including a stay-at-home dad, a former feminist, and an over-structured mom, finds its sleepy existence shattered when a convicted child molester moves back into town and two of the parents have an affair.
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Truth & Beauty
by Ann Patchett
What happens when the person who is your family is someone you aren't bound to by blood? What happens when the person you promise to love and to honor for the rest of your life is not your lover, but your best friend? In Truth & Beauty, her frank and startlingly intimate first work of nonfiction, Ann Patchett shines a fresh, revealing light on the world of women's friendships and shows us what it means to stand together. Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writers' Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work was. In her critically acclaimed and hugely successful memoir, Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy wrote about losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, the years of chemotherapy and radiation, and then the endless reconstructive surgeries. In Truth & Beauty, the story isn't Lucy's life or Ann's life, but the parts of their lives they shared. This is a portrait of unwavering commitment that spans twenty years, from the long, cold winters of the Midwest, to surgical wards, to book parties in New York. Through love, fame, drugs, and despair, this book shows us what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined. This is a tender, brutal book about loving a person we cannot save. It is about loyalty, and about being lifted up by the sheer effervescence of someone who knew how to live life to the fullest.
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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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