The 13 short stories in Beattie's latest collection travel up and down the East Coast--from Maine to New York City to Key West. In doing so, they share shrewd observations of unexpected friendships, aging, regrets, and new connections. Jacques Roy and Gabra Zackman narrate their assigned tales with comfortable deliveries that invite the listener into these slices of life. Roy's deliveries are compelling yet detached. He recounts the stories as if making observations about mutual acquaintances, without changing tone, accent, or pacing. Zackman is also conversational but less detached. She subtly distinguishes between characters in conversations, deepening the timbre of her voice when the dialogue requires a male voice. Both narrators deliver Beattie's astute observations and droll humor with a light, inviting touch.
Pub Date: June 13, 2017
Duration: 7 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781508241645
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
American colleges are favorable locales for ghastly event and hair-tearing circumstance. There is, for instance, a good deal of pleasure to be had out of professor and past-prodigy Grady Tripp's awful life, as portrayed by Michael Chabon in WONDER BOYS. There is a certain amount of slapstick here, but it's balanced by Chabon's superb portrait of a gale-force mid-life crisis, a soul-destroying albatross of an unfinished novel and the mind-numbing inconsequence of writers' conferences. David Colacci sounds a little starved for oxygen in his reading, but that's not exactly out of keeping with Grady Tripp's personal gestalt.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: N/A
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
Class lurks in varying degrees behind every great English comedy, its ineffable code being so endlessly conducive to ironic subtlety. QUEEN LUCIA, the first of the great Lucia novels of E.F. Benson, is imbued with it. Nonetheless, social striving rather than class per se gives the novel its real comic force. At its center is Lucia, the regnant, self-appointed social and cultural leader of a genteel, middle-class circle. She’s a schemer and poser of awesome theatricality and self-delusion. Although the narrative is conducted in the third person, the characters’ doings, most especially Lucia’s, are as often as not reported in the light in which the perpetrators hope to be viewed. Still, the true facts and motivations, usually base, shine luminously through. Geraldine McEwen’s reading truly enhances the work, being a model of cultivated discretion and ironic pacing.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: 9 hrs
Publisher: ISIS Audio Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
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