Hold onto your earphones as narrator Geoffrey Cantor skillfully zooms into and out of the lives of Brooklynites from the 1970s to the 1990s. Some crime novels are character driven; others are plot driven. Lethem's latest work seems sociologically driven. Characters are designated by labels like "white boys" rather than names, unveiling clashing cultures, all struggling to thrive in the city. Cantor adeptly voices an Italian gang's toughness and a Jamaican mother's wisdom. Interspersed throughout, Cantor adopts a confidential tone as he voices the author, who directs listeners' focus to important details and occasionally comments on the writing. This dizzying listening experience illuminates the challenges of life in the city--where external and internal barriers test the mettle of its diverse inhabitants.
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
Duration: 13 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780062938961
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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