This new audio version of Toni Morrison's only short story highlights the brilliance of three Black women: Morrison, obviously; Zadie Smith, who reads her own thoughtful and moving introduction with sparkling curiosity; and narrator Bahni Turpin, whose vocal talents are on full display. The story, which Morrison wrote in 1980 and described as an "experiment," follows two characters from their girlhood at a state institution into their adult lives. Their races are left deliberately ambiguous. One is Black, and one white, but listeners are left guessing which is which. Turpin beautifully characterizes both women, capturing the deftness of Morrison's prose. It's fitting that such a unique story, written by one of America's greatest writers, is brought to life by one of the most gifted narrators working today.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
Duration: 1 hr, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593460573
Publisher: Random House 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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