Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most distinguished figures in American letters, and her matchless prose is best enjoyed when spoken aloud. The husband-and-wife team of Susan Ericksen and David Colacci are gifted professionals who narrate this novel and embroil us in the tragedy of the Mayfield family, whose younger daughter, the one they call “the smart one,” goes missing. Some of the most memorable portrayals in this stream-of-consciousness story include the older sister’s protestation of love for her wounded and psychologically damaged fiancé, the mother’s shaken voice as she tries to accept her daughter’s disappearance, and the soldier’s haunted tones as he remembers the horrors of his service in Iraq. This is a disturbing yet compelling listening experience, and its narrators show us the complexity of human experience.
Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2014
Duration: 19 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062268303
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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