The raspy voice of MacLeod Andrews brings this hard-hitting masculine story to life in all its harshness, derision, and wit. The main character's biting sarcasm runs throughout the story, and listeners become acquainted with his worldview through his letters. Andrews never lets up on these qualities in his characterization, which he conveys with precise diction. He delivers the narrative at a rapid pace reminiscent of angst-ridden young male protagonists like J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield. The danger of such a vivid portrayal and dramatic persona is that too much of it can seem flat, like hearing the same note being played over and over. Those who enjoy bluntness, however, will find much to appreciate in the main character.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2013
Duration: 9 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780385366298
Publisher: Random House 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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