The short stories of Vladimir Nabokov, varied and often strange to the unfamiliar ear, are complex in conception and execution. In audio form, these 65 stories benefit greatly from Arthur Morey’s steady, firmly paced delivery and general lack of affectation. This fine production excels in clarity and consistency of voice, and in all-around good judgment regarding what would make an audio production of this particular collection accessible and pleasurable. The only fault here is that it’s sometimes difficult to mark the break from one story to the next. Nabokov’s gift for word images is at its most wondrous in this wide-ranging collection of stories, many of them gems, all of them unique. Commuters and multi-taskers, beware: This title is recommended for quiet, focused listening.
Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2010
Duration: 31 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781441872852
Publisher: Brilliance 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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