On audio, Margaret Atwood's new collection of short pieces is a mixed bag, both texts and performances. Many of these entries are less stories than witty finger exercises. Examples: Atwood has a conversation with a post-body George Orwell. Hypatia of Alexandria dryly describes being murdered by a misogynist mob with clam shells. A man comes to realize his wife has the soul of a snail. A teenage girl believes her mother is a witch. Most of the professional performances, particularly Linda Lavin's and Bahni Turpin's, are crisply effective. Less successfully, Atwood performs most of the elegiac Tig and Nell stories herself, including the title story. Psychologically shrewd though she is, her Canadian inflections distract, and some will miss the smooth polish of the trained actors.
Pub Date: March 7, 2023
Duration: 8 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593666586
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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