This audio collection from Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano brings together three novellas with political overtones: the eponymous COWBOY GRAVES, chronicling the protagonist's life leading up to his return to Chile when the coup hits; FRENCH COMEDY OF HORRORS, in which a poet answers a ringing pay phone and learns of a secret society called the Clandestine Surrealist Group in Paris; and FATHERLAND, in which the protagonist faces a coup in his country while recalling a lost love. Narrator Anthony Rey Perez has a quietly husky delivery, conveying Bolano's enigmatic writing style and summoning a muted air of suspense. His well-paced narration is thoughtful and understated, allowing the listener to explore the possibilities of the author's stories.
Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2021
Duration: 4 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593289211
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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