Patricia Lockwood's fragmentary, kaleidoscopic novel about life in the Internet age is expertly rendered by Kristen Sieh. The funny, moving, and profane tale features an unnamed star of social media who spends her time posting and scrolling in the hive mind of the web--which she calls "the portal"--where "the only thing that bound us together was the belief that in other countries they eat unspeakable food." Then a family crisis jerks her out of the "rapacious indifference and vacant avidity" that characterizes the portal and drops her into the real world of needy living humans. Sieh's clarity, audible smiles, and raised-eyebrow-irony, along with perfect timing on the tumbling witticisms, enhance this inventive consideration of the human connection.
Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2021
Duration: 4 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593395240
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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