In fourteen witty, surreal, and wildly original interrelated stories,
Iris Smyles joyfully interrogates the paradoxes of life and language and
gives us a new view of our world.
Welcome to the world of Droll Tales, in which reality is a mutually
agreed-upon illusion, and life is painful, enigmatic, beautiful, and
brief. With an oddball cast of characters who reappear in various
guises, Smyles gives us a tour of an enchanted, absurd, off-kilter world
with its own workings and ways of expression--one that overlaps 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 philosophical vaudeville, a cabinet of curiosities, 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.
