After a moody jazz riff, Sidik Fofana and a stand-out cast of performers transport listeners to the Banneker Terrace apartments in Harlem. Written in vibrant Black American vernacular, these witty, sad, uplifting stories are ideal for audio. Joniece Abbott-Pratt's Mimi is a beautician behind on the rent. Fofana's Swan might mess up because of a visitor. André Santana's Darius tries to earn funds by offering therapy instead of prostitution. Bahni Turpin's Ms. Dallas is a classroom aide bossed too often by a Harvard-educated teacher. DePre Owens's Kandese manages a candy-selling ring of girls. Nile Bullock's Najee and pals dance for tips in the subway. Jade Wheeler's Quanneisha handles residents she doesn't like. Dominic Hoffman's Mr. Murray earns money playing chess. They're all unforgettable.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
Duration: 6 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781797145020
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 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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