The only Jewish professor at a small western New York state college finds himself at his wits' end when he is asked to shepherd a radical Hebrew scholar around town on a job interview. Combining the tones of serious historical fiction with Borscht-Belt humor, author/narrator Joshua Cohen embodies the voice of Ruben Blum, who is just trying to navigate the turbulent late 1950s when his "Jewishness" is put to the test. Television standout David Duchovny and comedian Ethan Herschenfeld add deadpan cameo appearances reading letters of recommendation for the applicant. Laced with bright musical interludes and soundscapes, this crazy saga may lead the listener to ask, "Really, some of this is true?" The edges of history have never sounded like so much fun.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2021
Duration: 8 hrs, 30 mins
Publisher: Pushkin Industries
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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