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Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award.
Winner of the 2001 Audie Award for Classics
This recording took first prize for classic fiction at this year's Audie Awards, and I've never experienced such a happy marriage of prose, performance, and production. Maugham's words are chosen with exquisite skill. Charlton Griffin brings each character to life with a voice both subtle and compelling. Ordinarily, I abhor the use of sound effects in serious fiction, but like parsley on a dish, this background garnishes and never interferes or detracts. Brief musical passages are used as punctuation. On shipboard, we hear a live band, the rattle of crockery. These pieces were written before style had defeated craftsmanship in the battle for short fiction. Each is a clockwork masterpiece.
Benjamin H. Cheever
AudioFile Magazine
Lover of words finds his short, sweet niche
by Sandy Bauers
The Philadelphia Inquirer
CHARLTON GRIFFIN can still picture it as if it were only yesterday instead of more than twenty years ago.
Apprenticed to a winemaker in Germany, he'd work in the winery all day, and at night he'd read to his wife. There they were: the Rhine, the swans, a beautiful castle in the distance, and Wuthering Heights. Or Dickens. Or P. G. Wodehouse.
Later, when he became a voiceover artist, he still read to his wife.
"She was the type of person who was always read to. I liked to read aloud. It was a match made in heaven," he said.
Gradually, what had been a dream became a possibility, and then, when the price of the equipment dropped, a reality.
Today, Griffin is owner, engineer, material selector, and narrator for Audio Connoisseur, a fledgling company with fewer than 20 titles. He reads classic short stories -Chekhov, Maugham, Maupassant, and the like - into a home computer, then adds classical music embellishments and sound effects.
"All I need is a computer, a microphone and a quiet place," he said - not too difficult when one is working from home in a tony section of Atlanta.
His first title, The Short Stories of William Somerset Maugham, won an Audie Award - annual audio book awards that are similar to the movie industry's Oscars or Broadway's Tonys.
It's easy to see why. These are elegant, compelling productions, clearly the work of someone who has a love for words.
Griffin, who has a meltingly rich and velvety baritone voice, reads more slowly than many narrators. He said the relaxed pace is intentional.
"I want you to think about every sentence. I want you to think about the spaces," he said. "These are works of great literature and they bear thought. They're not just slap-dash."
His selection of classic short stories is also purposeful - not just a result of wanting to pick something short and in the public domain, so he doesn't have to worry about the mess and expense of buying the rights.
Griffin feels the genre is neglected, and he wants to rejuvenate interest. He views short stories, he said, as an intriguingly compact form, full of "concentrated energy," likening them to string quartets instead of symphonies.
He figures his productions will appeal to educated sorts who don't want to get wrapped up in a ten-hour recording, people who want to get the beginning, middle and end all in one commute.
Griffin has put a lot of thought into the productions. He's attempted to figure out who, in third-person stories, the unnamed narrator is.
This makes sense, especially for audio, since it's someone the reader is actually portraying. He tries to figure out, "Who is this guy telling the story? Why is he telling it? What's he like?"
The sound effects are where he shines, too. So often, these are intrusive and stupid. But those bug sounds on Maugham's "The Outstation" and the church bells in Chekhov's "The Two Volodyas" converted me.
Although a steady diet of short stories might feel limiting after a bit, Griffin is carving out a fine audio niche.
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