The 13 stories in this collection are mostly set in the Pacific Northwest. All are told by men who are down on their luck. Many of them have served in the military, all have broken relationships, and most are struggling to connect with their sons. By creating distinct voices for the protagonists and matching his tone and pacing to each plotline, narrator Edoardo Ballerini preserves the stories' individuality. At the same time, he emphasizes their themes by coloring his performance with pain and desperation, defeatism or frantic hope. Ballerini's sensitivity and respect help listeners connect with the characters. Author Jess Walter reads the last piece, which reveals the inspiration for the stories. C.B.L. 2014 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
Duration: 5 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780062239914
Publisher: Harper 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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