Narrator Tim Andrés Pabon captures the uniquely American tone embodied in this globe-trotting novel based on the life of Joe Sanderson—a Midwestern kid who began his life on the road in 1960 by hitchhiking to Mexico City. In pursuit of endless adventure and grist for his never completed “great American novel,” Sanderson moved from hanging out with Rastas in Jamaica to crossing the DMZ in Korea to working with the UN in strife-torn Biafra. He finally found himself embedded with Salvadoran revolutionaries in 1980. Pabon’s fluency in Spanish becomes essential while reading the many Spanish passages and place names. Pabon’s voice registers sadness and loss when Sanderson was killed by the U.S. backed Salvadoran army—a tragic coda to a wandering life.
Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020
Duration: 14 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781250752833
Publisher: Macmillan 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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