Are You Listening?
J. P. McEvoy
2025

J. P. McEvoy's sixth and final novel, originally published in 1932, satirizes the then-newish medium of radio, one of the earliest novels to do so. Radio provided entertainment and companionship for many, but it also brought crass commercialism, the lowering of high culture, and even police surveillance. It begins as the story of three sisters who come to New York and get involved with men in the radio industry: scenario-writers, announcers, advertisers, directors, and amateur and professional hangers-on. But the light romantic comedy soon turns into a dark police thriller, all conveyed in McElroy's innovative formatting: radio 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