Mirron Willis, having narrated several Walter Mosley audiobooks, has an experienced grasp of the author's cadence and language. This familiarity, as well as Willis's prudent pronunciation, makes for a confident and compelling reading of Mosley stories. Like Mosley's novels, these tales are digressive and imaginative, dealing with, among other things, a fly's friendship, the sexual prowess of superheroes, and the transmigration of the human soul. But if there is any thread that connects this collection, it is Mosley's explorations of aging and death. We are all just "a hair's breadth from finality," one character reminds us. But don't let the subject matter put you off. Thanks to Willis's upbeat delivery--check out his voicing of Billy the Texan--and Mosley's dabs of surrealistic relief (a plastic surgeon's blind date leads to a metaphysical breakthrough; a company delivers messages from the dead), this quirky audiobook always entertains.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
Duration: 10 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781705256428
Publisher: Tantor Media
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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