Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote with passion about Jews and their struggles in Europe. In THE SLAVE, Singer tells the story of Jacob, enslaved following a 1648 Polish uprising, and Wanda, a Christian with whom he falls in love. After being freed, Jacob returns to marry Wanda, and they face a life of complications created by their “unthinkable” union. The use of two readers is ideal. David Chandler and Tracy Sallows are flawless as they infuse the characters with intensity and conviction that seem to derive directly from Singer. Chandler provides Jacob with the ideal mix of indignation and righteousness, whether he endures scorn, accepts reverence for his knowledge, or suffers from tragedy. THE SLAVE demonstrates why Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2002
Duration: 10 hrs
Publisher: Jewish Contemporary Classics
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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