This historical fiction about Sylvia Plath and her circle of confessional poets is wonderfully performed by Maggi-Meg Reed, Karissa Vacker, and Teri Clark Linden. In 2019, three notebooks are discovered that are believed to be the handwritten notes of Plath's semi-autobiographical novel, THE BELL JAR. The story is told by Estee, curator of a contemporary auction house; Boston Rhodes, a pseudonym for Agatha White, Sylvia's literary rival; and Ruth Barnhouse, the psychiatrist treating Sylvia after a failed suicide attempt. Reed's cultured tone provides Estee with intelligence and dignity. Linden's voice drips poisonously as Boston Rhodes reveals her venomous side in a letter to influential poet Robert Lowell. Vacker's Dr. Barnhouse is forward-thinking, determined, and sympathetic. Well-written and well-read, this is choice listening. S.J.H Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Pub Date: March 8, 2022
Duration: 8 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780063140035
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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