Seven talented narrators capture the unsettling and weird nature of this collection of seven stories. The longest story is deftly narrated by Mexican actor Yareli Arizmendi. Lola, an elderly woman who is losing her mind and wants to die, can't manage to make it happen. The talented Daisy Guevara narrates the most nerve-wracking story in which she convincingly voices an 8-year-old girl who is led away from a hospital waiting room by a man whose motives are unclear. Other stories deal with nonsensical, unsettling, borderline demented behavior that will unnerve listeners, prompting them to search for meaning in the thought-provoking collection. Each narrator rises to the challenge of interpreting the arresting--and sometimes even funny--situations the characters find themselves in. A.M. 2022 National Book Award Winner © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
Duration: 3 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593612378
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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