For historical fiction to have its full effect, the listener must feel connected with its characters and events. This audiobook, meticulously researched and discreetly educational, takes the listener into the world of poet and recluse Emily Dickinson. The novel is told from a friend's point of view, and Flo Gibson's voice, endearingly authentic, is ideal for this type of reminiscence. Her voice reveals a kind character, one who has experienced many years and is willing to confide in her audience without excessive drama. As well as a fascinating account of about two lives, this story is pleasantly informative about nineteenth-century American life. This is a production not just for the literary-minded. Anyone who enjoys a good story will enjoy an afternoon with Emily.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2008
Duration: 18 hrs, 30 mins
Publisher: Audio Book Contractors
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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