Jim Frangione splendidly narrates this "full deck" of stories, which Chekhov wrote from 1883 to 1898. Frangione's mastery of Russian names and nomenclature infuses this wide-ranging collection with the world of the late nineteenth century. He paces his narration to the stories' style and gives the carefully delineated characters subtle differences in their manners of speech. His deliberate and nuanced performance places us in the milieu of czarist Russia, where people ride in troikas and live in dachas, and social status always matters. When he narrates the dramatic monologues, he plays out the interior lives of princesses, doctors, and functionaries, and even makes the sound of a dog's "grrr . . . nya-nya-nya-nya"--the listener is transported. The fine translations from Pevear and Volokhonsky serve the grand master of the short story and the listener well.
Pub Date: April 14, 2020
Duration: 20 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593169636
Publisher: Random House 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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