Israeli American author Moriel Rothman-Zecher delivers a dazzling narration of his novel of trauma, identity, and sexuality in 1930s Philadelphia. The story centers on three characters: recent arrivals to America Leyb and Gittl, who are the only Jewish survivors of a pogrom in their Ukrainian village, and Charles, a Black intellectual whom Leyb meets in a gay bar. Charles, who has some fluency in Yiddish, helps Gittl, a poet, translate her work into English. With its frequent switches between English and Yiddish words and a nonlinear plot, this is a challenging listen. But it is also rewarding. Every sense is engaged by the novel's precise, inventive language and Rothman-Zecher's impassioned performance such that listeners may see, hear, and smell the sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes hopeful world portrayed.
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
Duration: 6 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781696608855
Publisher: HighBridge 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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