Kevin R. Free delivers a dazzling performance of a novel that centers around contemporary artists living in Iowa City. Poets, writers, and musicians sit around at parties, in bars, and at cafés, discussing what it means to be an artist. Their social lives are deliciously messy as they fall in and out of love, seeking companionship to rid themselves of their loneliness. Free’s narration moves among the viewpoints of the main characters with ease, creating a distinct voice for each one. As is the case for all the best narrators, his performance is completely engrossing. He perfectly embodies the characters, expressing every inch of their humanity. His voice carries so much emotion, capturing characters’ inner lives and dialogue as they’re consumed by love, jealousy, and obsession.
Pub Date: 2023
Duration: 9 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593671801
Publisher: Penguin 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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