A medley of voices from five narrators generates a compelling presentation of DeLillo’s evocative short stories, written between 1979 and 2011. As a myriad of characters—such as nuns, astronauts, students, terrorists—delve beneath the surface of strangers’ lives, the narrators’ deliver satisfying tones of irony, inquiry, and discovery. In the title story, Mercedes Ruehl’s voice deftly shifts from strident youth to aged nun as sisters, street thugs, and neighbors confront a miracle on a billboard in the Bronx. Michael Cerveris draws listeners through the limbo of travel delays in “Creation” and into the future with “Human Moments in World War II.” Peter Friedman reads “The Starveling” and “Hammer and Sickle”; Heather Lind reads “The Ivory Acrobat” and “Baader-Meinhoff.” Aaron Tveit carries listeners through “The Runner” and “Midnight in Dostoevsky.”
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2011
Duration: 6 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781442346482
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 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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