Ari Fliakos portrays Paul Bunyan, JD Jackson portrays John Henry, and Tanis Parenteau embodies Bright Eyes in this debut quest novel, which masterfully mixes myth, capitalism, and racism. Impoverished Paul Bunyan mines Lump, a toxic mineral that causes his wife to fall gravely ill. With a mythical creature guiding him, he races to find the one machine that could save her. In doing so, his path converges with John Henry's. Fliakos covers all of Bunyan's emotions, ranging from disbelief in myths to rage against society. Jackson conveys John Henry, whose emotions range from despair over racism to the hope of unlikely freedom. And Parenteau voices a Native American with a distrust of others yet a motherly instinct to help. The narrators combine their talents to create a compelling emotional tale, current and true.
Pub Date: March 26, 2024
Duration: 10 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593821794
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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