Are You Listening?
J. P. McEvoy
August 21, 2025
ISBN 9798218718916 / Paperback / 232 pages / $19.99

Originally published in 1932, J. P. McEvoy's sixth and final novel, was among the first to satirize the then-newish medium of radio. McEvoy recognized that, despite being a source of entertainment and companionship for many, radio brought about crass commercialism, lowered the bar of culture, and increased police surveillance. The novel begins on a light note, with three sisters arriving in New York and becoming involved with men in the radio industry—scenario-writers, announcers, advertisers, directors, and amateur and professional hangers-on. But the romantic comedy turns dark, shifting into a police thriller, conveyed through McEvoy's innovative and experimental formatting: broadcasts, song snippets, unattributed dialogue, commercials, and police reports. Are You Listening? is the harshest of McEvoy’s novels, but it may also be his best.

"All of the wild hinterland of radio is here. . . . Mr. McEvoy's satirical performance before the literary microphone is the most convincing broadcast that has yet sprung from the mad jungle of our greater broadcasting emporiums. . . . And it is highly complementary to the author that, in spite of the phantasmagoria of distorted values that surge about the microphone, there isn't a false note in Mr. McEvoy's treatment of this half-mad world."
— Hollister Noble, New York Times Book Review

"Mr. McEvoy has been ere this a champion of the comic spirit. He has also, however, seen the cruel significance behind all the moronic chatter now burdening the ether, and has praiseworthily evoked it in this novel. Underneath all the japery, it mutters in our ears like the ghost of Hamlet's father!"
— William Rose Benét, Saturday Review of Literature