Karen Russell, the magical realism and prose virtuoso, conjures the American Dust Bowl. Her vibrant imaginings are voiced by a stellar cast. Sophie Amoss shimmers as the Antidote, a "prairie witch" who takes verbal deposits; Asphodel Oletsky, a teen recently orphaned when her mom was murdered, is vividly portrayed by Elena Rey; and the masterful Mark Bramhall inhabits the sane, sensitive, long-suffering wheat farmer, Harp Oletsky. The audiobook's action occurs between two immense weather events six weeks apart in 1935--an epic dust storm dubbed "Black Sunday" bookended by a torrential rain and flood. The novel is set in fictional Uz, Nebraska; highlights include dramatic dust and wind descriptions, a talking scarecrow, and a camera that makes its own photos of the past, the present, and a possible future.
Pub Date: March 11, 2025
Duration: 17 hrs
DD ISBN: 9798217018635
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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