With a rich literary tone and an encyclopedic feel for detail, Daniel Mason offers a kaleidoscope of ideas, voices, and images in this career-spanning collection of nine short stories read by six narrators. The author's fascination with themes and styles of the nineteenth century figures prominently in stories such as the examination of bare-knuckle fighting in "Death of the Pugilist," read by Michael Crouch; the surreal look at a woman balloonist in "On the Cause of Winds and Waves, Etc." read by newcomer Susannah Jones; and the ghostly "On Growing Ferns and Other Plants in Glass Cases, in the Midst of the Smoke of London," read by the British Lucy Rayner. Intelligent, darkly intense, and powerful listening.
Pub Date: May 5, 2020
Duration: 5 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781478999010
Publisher: Hachette 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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