In this collection of previously unpublished short stories by the award-winning author of THE COLOR OF WATER, an outstanding team of narrators portrays a variety of characters. Novelist McBride peels back the thin veneer on American life with intellect, emotion, and, at times, stinging humor. Arthur Morey affects an anxious tone and a purposeful pace as he portrays an antique dealer who discovers a priceless toy and deals with a stubborn man of God. In another story, narrator Nile Bullock takes on an adolescent tone as he perfectly captures the teenage dreamers in the Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band as they deal with their aspirations for their music and conflict over how to cope with life, love, and hope.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
Duration: 8 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780525497974
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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