The Writer In Your Ear

A new CD gives us writers reading their own work. “Writers who seemed beyond our reach are suddenly in our ears, revealing the often startling distance between their voices and the ones we imagine while reading — not to mention the ones that grab us from a movie screen. One of the great surprises is finding which writers actually do voices and which don’t. When A. A. Milne reads from “Winnie-the-Pooh,” his creations sound like Victorian gents — soothing, paternal Victorian gents reading a bedtime story, it’s true, but rather Victorian nonetheless.”