Narrator Ethan Herisse gives a subtle heartbreaking performance in this previously unpublished novel by Richard Wright. Fred Daniels is returning home from work to his pregnant wife when he is accosted by police and tortured into a false confession. Escaping into the sewer, Daniels wanders underground in an allegorical fever dream that mirrors the state of midcentury Black America. Since the story is largely internal and surreal, Herisse gives Daniels an understated tone as he struggles to comprehend his circumstances and actions while living in the sewer. This allows the scenes in which Daniels encounters others, especially the police, to crackle with terror and confusion. Herisse returns to steady assuredness in the accompanying essay, "Memories of My Grandmother," and the afterword by Malcolm Wright, Richard's grandson.
Pub Date: April 20, 2021
Duration: 6 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062971470
Publisher: Harper 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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