Malcolm Hillgartner's narration is reminiscent of classic "Twilight Zone" voice-overs. This audiobook mostly defies summary, save for a few key starting points. Two decades after 9/11, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center suddenly reappear in the Dakota Badlands. On the 93rd floor of one of the towers, Jesse Presley, the stillborn twin of Elvis, blinks into existence, unsure of exactly who is he is or where he came from. In California, siblings Parker and Zema begin a road trip to Michigan, with a detour to visit the towers. The story's structure (or lack thereof) initially may be jarring, but Hillgartner is a stabilizing presence. His commanding delivery makes the impossible seem plausible, and guides listeners through a surreal journey.
Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
Duration: 6 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9781504793698
Publisher: Blackstone 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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