Millhauser is a master of examining the idyllic facade of small-town life and giving it a suspenseful edge in this collection of 16 short stories. Narrator Adam Grupper's deep voice and drawn-out cadence successfully magnify the sense of middle-aged tedium, particularly in the story in which a man discovers he must now become the parent to his mother. Alyssa Bresnahan's crisp diction and edgy tone bring out the appropriate level of paranoia woven into "The Wife and the Thief," and Jonathan Davis strikes the right notes of professionalism to make the fantastic sound credible when a mermaid washes up on the shores of New Haven, Connecticut. In this macabre smorgasbord of great writing, each story is equally compelling as a straight-through listen or taken in hours at a time.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2015
Duration: 11 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781490676050
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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