This multilayered novel is deepened by two first-person narrations, which are expertly voiced by Keith Szarabajka and Kirby Heyborne. Szarabajka’s command of tone provides an authentic portrayal of Arthur, a former college professor who—rejected by his father, his peers, and his love interest, Charlene—becomes an obese recluse. Heyborne’s appealing, well-crafted performance brings out the adolescent angst of Kel, son of the alcoholic Charlene. Kel struggles as he grows up in a working-class neighborhood while maintaining his popular jock identity at his prestigious high school. Themes of classism, rejection, loneliness, and escape course throughout this poignant story. The unique strengths of each narrator enable listeners to connect with both Arthur and Kel as they discover themselves, each other, and their mutual connection to Charlene.
Pub Date: March 1, 2012
Duration: 11 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781455160181
Publisher: Blackstone 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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