Thanks to James Aaron Oh, listeners don't need to have grown up in New England to fall in step with the East Gladness transients in this audiobook. Oh introduces listeners to the region through the poetic perspective of Hai, a troubled Vietnamese son whose failure to realize the American dream haunts him so much that he's preparing to jump off a bridge. Above the churning waters, toxic with industrial runoff, he's saved by a Lithuanian guardian angel named Grazina, who speaks like an "Eastern European sailor." As they convalesce together, Oh's growl reveals Grazina's painful past and uncertain future, while Hai's diverse fast-food co-workers provide riotous relief. Oh's sensitive multicultural narration often grounds Vuong's lofty language, rooting his luminous prose with the gritty realities of these characters' lives.
Pub Date: May 13, 2025
Duration: 14 hrs
DD ISBN: 9798217071692
Publisher: Penguin 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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