The word "herculean" best describes the struggle of narrator Paul Boehmer as he brings to life the colorful characters in this expansive and immersive novel. The featured character is New York University academic Andrew Cohen, whose nearly perfect life is coming apart as a result of a series of religious-based hallucinations. Boehmer affects an authoritative tone as he paints vivid images of contemporary New York City. He refuses to let excessive description and long sequences of seemingly useless information bog him down as he aids the author's exploration of intellectual Jewish-American life at the turn of the 21st century. For a novel that is at times complicated and exasperating, Boehmer uses his premier vocal abilities and unmistakable intellect to "thread the needle" to an ultimately satisfying conclusion.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
Duration: 21 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780062791122
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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