Kotaro Watanabe's strategy for narrating Murakami's collection of short stories is to perform in a slightly inflected style that gently pulls the listener into the author's imaginary worlds. Watanabe's flat delivery makes the plot unfold like a morning paper, while the action, such as it is, arrives deliberately. In these stories magic happens, but the characters often seem listless, even as the setting feels surreal. The stories range from the fantastical "Confessions of the Shinagawa Monkey," in which the protagonist meets a talking monkey who steals women's identities, to "Carnaval," built around an appreciation of Schumann's music. Two more stories feature a one-night stand with a tanka poet and an ode to baseball with a digression on players' posteriors. Watanabe maintains the sense of unease and disconnection that pervade this audiobook in which magical realism reigns.
Pub Date: April 6, 2021
Duration: 5 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593349229
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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