Dick Hill animates Philip Roth's tragic comedy. (Or is it comic tragedy?) Hill's exuberance and vitality elevate Roth's characters from the written page and through some sort of verbal legerdemain render them as tangible and present as anyone else you encounter. That is especially true of Roth's continuously indignant protagonist, Marcus Meisner, who in 1951 flees Newark and the suddenly suffocating overprotectiveness of his kosher butcher father, for the pastoral and decidedly goyish Winesburg College in rural Ohio. Though Meisner wants nothing more than to follow the rules and excel (and avoid the Korean War), he continually finds himself transgressing this social more or that requisite. Hill's depiction of Marcus's indignation is uproarious but no less than his portrayal of the moral rectitude and sanctimoniousness of Winesburg's elders.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2008
Duration: 5 hrs
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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