Brian Nishii gives these three novellas a vivid, unforgettable performance. His sense of timing and his pace work well, and he shifts his tone from character to character subtly but intelligently. Honoring the spare prose, Nishii illuminates the harsh existences of the characters. Job loss, beatings, and other violence take place, but there's wit and whimsy, too. Family competition over status provides humor. Shuang Xuetao is among China's most honored young writers; ROUGE STREET is his first work to be translated into English. He captures industrial Shenyang, the part of China that was left behind after the economic restructuring. His prose is grounded in the quotidian, yet he can remind the listener of Borges or Kafka. This audiobook is immersive and haunting.
Pub Date: April 19, 2022
Duration: 6 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781705050231
Publisher: Recorded Books Inc.
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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