Cassandra Campbell's performance possesses a mix of humor, ennui, and hope--which is to say she has the perfect voice for an audiobook about the inner world of a novelist. Zambreno's title refers to the nature of the writing process as the writer works on a novel called DRIFTS. Listeners may hear Zambreno's opening passages as meandering and unfocused. Yet the audiobook builds power with time as the protagonist observes the daily abstractions of her life. On a given day, she considers the works of literary exemplars; other days she finds meaning in watching the opening credits of the TV show "Taxi." The existential weight of the world bears down on her as she navigates her world in isolation. Campbell captures all these complexities, conveying deep truths about the artistic process.
Pub Date: May 19, 2020
Duration: 7 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593211557
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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