Like the disembodied voice of a movie trailer, Ari Fliakos's deep and raspy voice draws listeners into this quirky yet melancholy story. Noah Body is a film critic in a future dystopia in which life is no better than the mind-numbing films he reviews. Performing the Sisyphean task of reviewing all the films no one wants to watch or read about, Noah infuses his reviews with commentary about his own life as he tries to dispossess himself of his ex-wife's lover, perpetuate a petty feud with an unnecessary nemesis, woo his doctor, and make a "real film." Fliakos uses a straightforward tone that contrasts with ridiculous situations, giving a sense of normalcy while also portraying the unfiltered reactions of the story's characters--or victims, as the case may be.
Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
Duration: 6 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780525626992
Publisher: Penguin 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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