New York Times Notable Books 2004 (1)
FICTION & POETRY
ALOFT. By Chang-rae Lee. (Riverhead, $24.95.) The developments of Long Island are the setting for a tale of a self-made American on the rise.
THE AMATEUR MARRIAGE. By Anne Tyler. (Knopf, $24.95.) An ambitious exploration of domestic dislocation, ranging over 60 years of American experience.
AMERICAN SMOOTH: Poems. By Rita Dove. (Norton, $22.95.) In this collection, dance is an implicit parallel to poetry, each an expression of grace performed within limits.
BANDBOX. By Thomas Mallon. (Pantheon, $24.95.) Two glossy magazines wage a circulation war in the twilight of the pre- Depression era.
A BIT ON THE SIDE. By William Trevor. (Viking, $24.95.) Stories about enduring love without purpose and adultery without passion.
CLOUD ATLAS. By David Mitchell. (Random House, paper, $14.95.) A novel that covers about 1,000 years in narratives involving a New Zealand stowaway, a book editor, a goatherd and others.
COLLECTED POEMS. By Donald Justice. (Knopf, $35.) Justice (1925-2004) spent most of his life around universities, and much of his attention looking behind him, preoccupied with the evocation of nostalgia and the endings of things.
THE CURSE OF THE APPROPRIATE MAN. By Lynn Freed. (Harvest/Harcourt, paper, $13.) Tough fiction whose theme is women's desire.
THE DARLING. By Russell Banks. (HarperCollins, $25.95.) A privileged American girl grows up to see her life ruined in a war in Liberia, and winds up caring for chimps.
THE FALLS. By Joyce Carol Oates. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $26.95.) The falls are Niagara and the advent of sin as well in this novel of high pressures and ungovernable forces.
THE FIRST DESIRE. By Nancy Reisman. (Pantheon, $24.) An impressionistic debut novel about the tensions and rivalries within an extended family.
FOUR SOULS. By Louise Erdrich. (HarperCollins, $23.95.) A vengeful, partly comical plot that ranges about in time and space, rising in pitch to conclude in gorgeous incantations and poetry.
GILEAD. By Marilynne Robinson. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) A demanding, grave and lucid novel in the form of a long letter from an aging preacher to his young son.
THE HAMILTON CASE. By Michelle de Kretser. (Little, Brown, $24.95.) A beguiling, multilayered novel that spans much of the 20th century.
HARBOR. By Lorraine Adams. (Knopf, $23.95.) This first novel, based on Adams's reporting for The Washington Post, captures the immensity of the terrorist challenge.
HEIR TO THE GLIMMERING WORLD. By Cynthia Ozick. (Houghton Mifflin, $24.) A novel of ideas, incarnated in an 18-year-old orphan girl who takes a job in 1935 as secretary to a scholar of an ancient Jewish heresy.
I AM CHARLOTTE SIMMONS. By Tom Wolfe. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.95.) Campus debauchery as seen through the oh-so-innocent eyes of a God-fearing young woman.
THE INNER CIRCLE. By T. Coraghessan Boyle. (Viking, $25.95.) Alfred C. Kinsey, premier American sex scientist, strives to perfect humankind in Boyle's skeptical novel.
THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB. By Karen Joy Fowler. (Marian Wood/Putnam, $23.95.) A comic novel, set in a California college town, that is more about how to read than about book groups or Jane Austen.
JONATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORRELL. By Susanna Clarke. (Bloomsbury, $27.95.) A fantasy, involving a Yorkshire magician (Norrell) who comes to London in 1806 and takes on the handsome Jonathan Strange for a disciple.
THE LEMON TABLE: Stories. By Julian Barnes. (Knopf, $22.95.) Old age and getting there is the scene of this collection by the author of ''Flaubert's Parrot.''
THE LINE OF BEAUTY.By Alan Hollinghurst. (Bloomsbury, $24.95.) This year's Booker Prize novel concerns a gay intellectual whose heart has room in it to like Margaret Thatcher.
LITTLE CHILDREN. By Tom Perrotta. (St. Martin's, $24.95.) Adultery and childraising in a generic suburb.
MAGIC SEEDS. By V. S Naipaul. (Knopf, $25.) A writer's restless world travels lead him back home to India and into the center of a revolution.
THE MASTER. By Colm Toibin. (Scribner, $25.) A deeply considered, crisply delivered novel whose hero is Henry James.
MEN AND CARTOONS: Stories. By Jonathan Lethem. (Doubleday, $19.95.) Brooklynite fiction by the author of ''The Fortress of Solitude.''
NATASHA: And Other Stories. By David Bezmozgis. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18.) A loosely linked anthropological collection that succinctly and unsentimentally depicts a world of Russian Jews in Toronto.
OBLIVION: Stories. By David Foster Wallace. (Little, Brown, $25.95.) Narratives in an exhaustive mode, told by people who notice absolutely everything.
OUR KIND. By Kate Walbert. (Scribner, $23.) A novel in stories, collectively narrated by women who came of age before 1960.
文章定位：
