| Vendor | |
|---|---|
|
Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus |
| Original language | |
| English | |
DROLL TALES
Witty and surreal interconnected stories that transcend time and rationality, from America's most original writer.
Transformation, identity, and speech that conceals and misleads as much as it explains form the core of these fourteen 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 and dark 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 philosophical vaudeville in Smyles's singular style, with the mystery of the human heart at its center.
Iris Smyles is the author of two previous books of fiction: Iris Has Free Time and Dating Tips for the Unemployed, which was a semi-finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Her essays and stories have been published by The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Vogue, BOMB, Paris Review Daily, The Baffler, and Best American Travel Writing, among other publications. Her short stories have been awarded The Geraldine Griffin Moore Award, The Adria Schwartz Award, and the Dorris Lipman Prize among others. She divides her time between New York City and Greece.
Transformation, identity, and speech that conceals and misleads as much as it explains form the core of these fourteen 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 and dark 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 philosophical vaudeville in Smyles's singular style, with the mystery of the human heart at its center.
Iris Smyles is the author of two previous books of fiction: Iris Has Free Time and Dating Tips for the Unemployed, which was a semi-finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Her essays and stories have been published by The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Vogue, BOMB, Paris Review Daily, The Baffler, and Best American Travel Writing, among other publications. Her short stories have been awarded The Geraldine Griffin Moore Award, The Adria Schwartz Award, and the Dorris Lipman Prize among others. She divides her time between New York City and Greece.
| Available products |
|---|
|
Book
Published 2022-07-01 by Turtle Point Press |