Performed by three actors, THE SIXTEENTH OF JUNE is a play on James Joyce's ULYSSES. All the action takes place on June 16th, known to Joyce aficionados as Bloomsday. Alternating chapters, Julia Whelan reads the story from Nora's perspective, Will Damron from Steven's, and MacLeod Andrews from Leo's. Flashbacks and tangents make the plot difficult to follow as the day's events progress from Steven and Leo Portman's grandmother's funeral to the annual Bloomsday party, and, finally, to the breaking of Nora and Leo's engagement. The actors trade chapters, using subtle shifts in vocal range to portray male and female characters. Working with themes of relationships, death, and marriage, Whelan, Damron, and Andrews balance a steady narration with the story's emotional arc. M.B.K. 2015 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
Pub Date: June 3, 2014
Duration: 8 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781491523148
Publisher: Brilliance 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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