Dani Martineck's quiet narration, full of longing and anger, sometimes wry and sometimes earnest, is as richly layered as this remarkable novel. Sol is a trans vampire who is trying to survive by living in the basement archive where he works. When he falls in love with the widow of a famous lesbian TV writer, he's finally inspired to confront his future. Martineck smoothly switches between Sol and his lover, Elsie, during their many long conversations. They deliver the ephemera scattered throughout the novel with just the right amount of academic detatchment. They especially excel during the sex scenes, which are heated but deeply emotional. A complicated love letter to queer and trans culture, fandoms, and the power of archives, this audiobook is an unusually creative delight.
Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2022
Duration: 6 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593557846
Publisher: Penguin 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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