Cindy Kay gives an eloquent and dignified narration of Yiyun Li's masterful 2006 story collection, which depicts the multifaceted lives of Chinese and Chinese-American characters. Kay's gentle and well-modulated voice lends itself to the intimate nature of the stories. For example, in the first story, "Extra," Kay gives the main character, Granny Lin, a sweetness that works well with her calm demeanor and contrasts with the poignancy of her reduced circumstances. The stories range from simple slice-of-life studies in both China and Chinese-American communities to stories about political life in modern China and sweeping historical tales of Imperial China. Despite this extraordinary variety, Kay's renderings weave them into a coherent whole.
Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
Duration: 6 hrs, 45 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593209233
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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