Narrating her own work, the Nobel Prize-winning poet Louise Glück offers her first work of fiction, a meditation on language, identity, motherhood, and death as experienced by not-yet-one-year-old twins Marigold and Rose. The pair are opposites: Rose is the "good" baby--pretty, happy, and social--whereas, Marigold is "difficult" and introspective. But Marigold is also a writer who is gathering material to write about their mother's childhood once she has the words. Glück's narration, weathered and tender, reveals her gift for storytelling. Her poetic roots are manifest as she dwells on gemlike realizations, which range from the recognition that books and animals do not judge to the desirability of adulthood's "vast cargo of words." This brief but penetrating audio is a treasure, illuminating new insights at every turn.
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
Duration: 1 hr
DD ISBN: 9781250875945
Publisher: Macmillan 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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