Droll Tales
- Author Iris Smyles
- Narrator various
- Publisher Blackstone Publishing
- Publish Date 31 May 2022
- Run Time 9 hours and 56 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Fiction: general and literary, Humorous fiction, Satirical fiction and parodies, Short stories.
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What to expect
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.
Critics Review
“Exhibits many elements of absurdist fiction: daft humor, illogical juxtapositions, the philosophizing of the banal, an obsession with meaninglessness.”
“[Smyles] never loses sight of the dark paradox of life as painful, confusing, lonely but also ‘fun, beautiful and, briefly ours.’ The stories, varying in style, all surprise with cleverness.”
“Innovative—filled with surrealistic imagery, dark comedy, and people unmoored in their lives.”
“[A] journey through the odder corners of existence.”
“Reading Droll Tales, I am in awe of what a great great great great writer Iris Smyles is.”
“A book full of wonders. Brilliant.”
“Droll Tales is dark, surreal, and very funny, one of the best combinations a reader could ask for.”
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