With its stellar ensemble of narrators, this surreal short story collection creates an immersive listening experience. The narrators rotate with each story, making each one shine. The works feature a chorus of dead cousins, a woman who is trying to survive a catastrophic flood, and the delight of two girls who are falling in love. The stories revel in the unexpected, delightfully surprising listeners at every turn. The narrators are excellent, with Nancy Wu, Natalie Naudus, and Catherine Ho seamlessly moving back and forth between characters of all ages, keeping pace with each story's mood. Elaine Wang and Annie Q shine, in particular, perfectly capturing the angst of youth, the quick snap of a teenager's retort. Together, all the narrators are the perfect cast for this audiobook.
Pub Date: July 12, 2022
Duration: 6 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593558980
Publisher: Random House 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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