Saunders’s untrained voice is the perfect conveyance for the earnest vernacular of his offbeat characters—and a convincing case for the argument that an author can be the best interpreter of his own text. In a society where the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity, Saunders’s tales of flat-brained parents and well-meaning neighbors and martinet lab directors are simultaneously terrifying and hilarious. His delivery is deadpan, after a fashion known in times past as frontier humor. Here the amazing feats are ones of outlook and mental construction rather than the muscular exploits of a jumping frog or a steamboat captain. The effect lies in an idiom forever out of sorts with the situation at hand—a subtly nuanced contemporary babble that Saunders captures so well on the page, and even better in this memorable audio production.
Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
Duration: 5 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780385359740
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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