This audiobook will have strong appeal to a very specific audience.
Matt Pittenger’s narration of this novel about a group of overeducated and underemployed millennial poets moves along at a steady pace. Some of the poetry, and many of the invocations of 20th- and 21st-century poets, may not be easily recognizable to those without a thorough education in poetry, but the characters come through as lively and consistently believable. The story’s humor and Pittenger’s command of tone and accent will keep listeners involved to the end, despite an aimless and unfocused protagonist, some plot threads that are left dangling, and repeated references to Marcel “Prowst.”
This audiobook will have strong appeal to a very specific audience.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
Duration: 4 hrs, 3 mins
DD ISBN: 9781668149126
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Review Posted Online: March 10, 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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