Iris Smyles – författare

Transformation, identity, and speech that conceals and misleads as much as it explains form the core of these fourteen linked stories and novelettes. We are guided through them by “Iris” and her friend “Jacob,” who, over the course of the book, appear in a variety of guises. They introduce, interact with, or inhabit various characters, each with their own stories to tell. In the romantic, dark, and sometimes surreal worlds they occupy, the commonplace is beautiful and often absurd, reality is a mutually agreed upon illusion, and life is painful, comic, paradoxical, and brief.

A young American woman treks through Europe’s great cities working as a living statue; a renowned Chekhov tale is at last translated into Pig Latin; a house full of surrealists compete for love on a reality TV show; a list of fortune cookie messages reveals the inner world of the young man employed to write them. And a story of love and heartbreak is told through sentence diagrams on a fifth grader’s grammar test.

Romantic, ironic, with notes of the surreal, Droll Tales is a winning entertainment in Smyles’s singular style, enriched by art history, philosophy, literature, and pop culture, with the mystery of the human heart at its center.

Witty and surreal tales that transcend rationality and illuminate our world, from America’s most original writer

Welcome to the world of Droll Tales, in which reality is a mutually agreed-upon illusion and life is painful, paradoxical, beautiful, and brief. With an oddball cast of characters who reappear in various guises throughout these interrelated stories, Smyles reveals an off-kilter world overlapping this one. And in giving us a tour of this enchanted, sometimes absurd place, with its own workings and ways of expression, she gives us a new way to understand our own.

A young suburban woman runs away to Europe to become a living statue; Mallarmé is at long last translated into pig Latin; a house full of surrealists compete for love on a reality TV show; a list of fortune-cookie messages reveals the inner world of the young man employed to write them; and a story of love and betrayal is told through the sentence diagrams on a fifth grader’s grammar test.

Romantic, dark, and ironic, Droll Tales is a book like none you have read. It is a joyful interrogation of the paradoxes underpinning life, a cabinet of curiosities, a philosophical vaudeville, a puzzle in fourteen pieces, and a tragicomic riddle articulated in Smyles’s singular style, with the mystery of the human heart at its center.