Author: Jill Durso

Certain stories never leave you. When I was six years old, I read such a story in Alvin Schwartz’s In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories: “The Green Ribbon.” In it, a young girl named Jenny wears a green ribbon around her neck and never takes it off. When her beloved asks, she says…

Sorry Please Thank You Charles Yu Pantheon, July 2012 240 pages $24.95 Charles Yu is weird. It’s just one of those things you can tell after reading the stories from his most recent collection, Sorry Please Thank You. There’s a zombie shopping for a date, a floating door to a dinner party in a parallel…

The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. Jonathan Lethem Doubleday, November 2011 464 pages $27.95 Have you ever found, after a long trip with a friend, that you’ve grown tired of their voice? That approximates how I felt after reading Jonathan Lethem’s most recent collection of prose, The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. Not that I…

You Deserve Nothing Alexander Maksik Europa Editions, August 2011 336 pages $15.00 Stop me if you’ve heard this story before: a handsome young teacher inspires great passion in the classroom; the guys want to be him, and the girls want to be with him. There’s an affair, scandal, loss of innocence, and plenty of inspirational…

Orientation Daniel Orozco Faber & Faber, May 2011 176 pages $23.00 In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work,) a book of essays and photos, Alain de Botton attempts an “exploration of the joys and perils of the modern workplace, beautifully evoking what other people get up to all day—and night—to make the frenzied contemporary world…