McCann’s able narration of this story collection has the same lyrical, measured quality as the Wallace Stevens poem that inspired its title. Indeed, each story has a calm, meandering pace as it explores words and images in the way of good poetry, often with ample pauses that imply line breaks. Characters reflect on the complex nature of life in vivid snapshots, and McCann’s voice enlivens the somber moments as well as the lighter ones. The author’s soft tone and appealing accent lull the listener into another, quieter place. This audiobook’s subtle quality may not be for everyone, but those willing to let the narrator take over will be led down a thought-provoking and emotionally rich path. L.B.F. 2016 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
Duration: 6 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780147521590
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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