Zugzwang is a position in chess in which all possible moves make your situation worse. In this intricately plotted novel, Otto Spethmann, a psychoanalyst in 1914 St. Petersburg, plays a long-running chess game with a fellow Polish Jew, the famous violinist Kopelzon, who has lately asked him to treat a brilliant but shattered young chess master called Rozental. But what is Rozental to Kopelzon? In their chess game, in Spethmann's life, and especially in the confusing and murderous revolutionary politics of the last years of Czarist Russia, zugzwang is a constant terrifying possibility. Stephen Lang masterfully manages this huge multinational cast of characters and dauntingly layered plot. Even the author sometimes teeters on the line between complexity and believability, but Lang is unfailingly convincing and entertaining.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2007
Duration: 8 hrs, 30 mins
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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