An award-winning author writes her eighth book, and an award-winning narrator records it. The superb audio short stories that result are hysterical, heartrending, wise, unexpected, and weird. Weird in a good way--does a bereaved mother actually transform into a monstrous animal, or does she just feel like one? Kate Reading's deep, melodic voice reveals the very marrow of Elizabeth McCracken's memorable tales of love, family, and perseverance. She transforms into whatever character walks onto the page, be they an adolescent American boy, an aging male radio show host, a female ventriloquist, or a family of English upper-crust types, plus one Dutchman. In between the sparking dialogue, she narrates clearly, seriously, and, when needed, sardonically, as befits these witty, sagacious tales.
Pub Date: April 13, 2021
Duration: 7 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063071193
Publisher: Harper 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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