A fantastic listen for fans of Saturday Night Live and similar sketch comedy shows.
An ensemble of narrators shares the behind-the-scenes story of a 1980s late-night comedy show through a whole host of media. As a young journalist conducts a series of interviews with the cast of the Midnight Show, transcripts, published articles, and one-on-one conversations slowly reveal that there is a slew of information yet to be disclosed. The main goal of her work is to discover what happened to popular cast member Lillian Martin, who disappeared decades earlier without a trace. The rest of the show’s cast would rather keep the secret buried. Each of the narrators enlivens this infectious audiobook through tone, inflection, and pacing.
A fantastic listen for fans of Saturday Night Live and similar sketch comedy shows.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
Duration: 9 hrs, 54 mins
DD ISBN: 9798217175123
Publisher: Random House Audio
Review Posted Online: yesterday
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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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