The author of the bestselling BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY (1984) looks at the elites who move through the art galleries and book parties of New York City. Narrator Edoardo Ballerini knowingly affects the accents and vocal rhythms of Corrine and Russell Calloway as they deal with the pressures of trying to maintain their lives as prices climb. Ballerini shines as he portrays Jack, a novelist with a distinct point of view who is discovered by Russell, an independent publisher. Jack is either the best thing that could have happened or a great risk. It’s 2008, and listeners—but not the Calloways—know what’s coming. McInerney is best at reflecting the lives of the beautiful people of Manhattan. Ballerini matches the tone of these sketches with a sharply honed delivery.
Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
Duration: 13 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780735206991
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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