Rebecca Lowman presents this provocative novel based on Peggy Guggenheim's diary and other historical sources. Lowman's thoughtful pace serves the narrative well as the listener experiences Peggy's reminiscences of her unconventional life and accomplishments. Because of her inherited wealth, Guggenheim was able to live a flamboyant bohemian existence, but Lowman also depicts her hidden vulnerability due to the early death of her beloved father and her insecurity about her own appearance. As Peggy attracts an eclectic collection of associates, lovers, husbands, and art, Lowman provides subtle characterizations for many of them. Lowman does best with the voice of Peggy herself as she matures into the focused, confident collector who shared her contemporary art with the world.
Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
Duration: 12 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780593741498
Publisher: Random House 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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