Torian Brackett and Ozzie Rodriguez offer a powerful performance of this 2023 National Book Award winner in which gay men muse over queer history and life. A young, unnamed man nurses an older dying man named Juan. Before Juan can rest in peace, he wants to pass on his life's project, which is based on a 1930s book titled SEX VARIANTS: A STUDY OF HOMOSEXUAL PATTERNS. Juan shares the story of queer researcher Jan Gay, and the young man recounts stories about his family and love life. Brackett's smooth, youthful tones convey the young man's emotions movingly. Rodriguez voices the older Juan, adding distinction with his mature voice and use of Spanish words. Author Torres delivers passages from SEX VARIANTS throughout the audiobook.
Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
Duration: 7 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781250910868
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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