Audie winner Ari Fliakos's task in narrating Foer's sprawling novel is to capture the distinct intonations of four generations of Jacob Bloch's family. His approach is to quietly interpret their interior monologues and to dramatize their rapid-fire dialogues. He renders whole this self-referential and self-absorbed, as well as quick-witted and hyper-aware, Jewish-American family, while illuminating numerous excursions into Jewish history and lore. Fliakos enlivens this passel of neurotics. The audiobook traces the Bloch family's stories of varied crises: An Armageddon-like earthquake threatens Israel's existence, Jacob and Julia Bloch's marriage dissolves, and Jacob's aged Holocaust-survivor grandfather commits suicide. Fliakos masterfully weaves the multiple perspectives (and many accents, including Israeli and Iranian) of this fragmented work into a cohesive and powerful audiobook.
Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
Duration: 17 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781427275905
Publisher: Macmillan 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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