PRAISE FOR DROLL TALES
"Erudite, original, and surprisingly poignant. . . . An entertainingly eclectic . . . journey through the odder corners of existence."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Like Honoré de Balzac's "Contes Drolatiques" (or "Droll Stories"), Iris Smyles's DROLL TALES exhibits many elements of absurdist fiction: daft humor, illogical juxtapositions, the philosophizing of the banal, an obsession with meaninglessness. Its tone, however, is far from droll; what's remarkable about this book is its exuberance. In "Medusa's Garden," in which a former ballerina becomes a living statue, or "Shelves," about a poet who writes corporate manuals, Smyles revels in the antics of her prose."
—New York Times Book Review
"[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."
—NPR
“[Smyles is] a Dr. Johnson of artistic conception.... The pithy brilliance pours out like water from one of the sculptural fountains that are described.... ‘Medusa’s Garden,’ the first piece in this collection, is a seamless masterpiece.”
—The East Hampton Star
“Droll Tales, Iris Smyles’s sideways homage [to Balzac], has plenty of eroticism but is just as intrigued by the comic possibilities of bizarre transformation.... “There is something appealingly review-proof about this book, which is too free and formless and random to adequately describe.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“It’s her intelligence and tone that make Smyles an enchanting writer—she’s ironic, funny, compassionate, critical (especially of intellectual and artistic pretense). She deliciously sends up self-serving lit crit and nervous pretention. . . . Iris Smyles is an original, planting herself squarely between parody and homage, ridicule and empathy. She’s an artist of the subversive and surreal, who would have and hold on to what’s left in our fractured world of the humane and the artistic.”
—The Southampton Press
"The connected stories in Iris Smyles’s Droll Tales are innovative—filled with surrealistic imagery, dark comedy, and people unmoored in their lives."
—Foreword Reviews
“Droll Tales is dark, surreal, and very funny, one of the best combinations a reader could ask for.”
—Roz Chast, author and illustrator of Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
“Reading Droll Tales, I flashed on Milan Kundera and David Sedaris, before concluding that Iris Smyles is that rarest of birds, a gifted nut, an eccentric fabulist.”
—John Patrick Shanley, writer of "Moonstruck" and "Doubt"
“This is the book God would read if God existed. I am in awe of what a great great great great writer Iris Smyles is.”
—Patricia Marx, author of You Can Only Yell at Me for One Thing at a Time: Rules for Couples
"A book full of wonders. Brilliant."
—Frederic Tuten, author of Tintin in the New World
"I was sitting here reading Droll Tales, trying to figure out why I was laughing. Contemporary books rarely make me laugh. It has happened four times, I think. Then it struck me. I'm laughing at her book because she's another tough customer who doesn't laugh at most supposedly funny books either, which is why she must write them herself. And thank goodness!"
—Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air
"Droll Tales is a brilliant and refreshing blend of cleverness and irony that made me laugh out loud, as it revealed the true strangeness of things we consider normal."
—Simon Van Booy, author of Love Begins in Winter and Night Came with Many Stars
PRAISE FOR IRIS SMYLES
"Hilarious high jinks . . . instant favorite."
—O, the Oprah Magazine
"Smyles is sharp, melancholy, and wickedly funny. She is unafraid to reveal and revel in her character’s flaws because it is what makes them so achingly, relatably human."
—Interview Magazine
"There are two kinds of people in this world, those without peanut allergies and those who cannot tolerate peanuts or any food produced or packaged in a facility that processes peanuts." Both will love this book."
—Andrea Martin, actress ("SCTV," "My Big Fat Greek Wedding") and author of Andrea Martin's Lady Parts
"Often hilarious, often tinged with sadness, but always authentic."
—Booklist
2022-04-13
Fourteen stories featuring deeply weird characters moving through surreal and—yes—droll circumstances.
If it’s the case that the opening story of a collection sets the tone for it, then readers can learn a lot from the opening of Smyles’ third book—following Dating Tips for the Unemployed (2016)—which begins with a glossary of “terms not found in this book.” Sample entries include “Apostrophe: any event occurring after a rophe” and “Lemon Merengue: to move like a whipped dessert.” This dad-joke bubble finally bursts after three pages, largely replaced by an approach that is part Monty Python and part René Magritte. (Though there are plenty of groaners like the above throughout.) Smyles knows her humor tends toward the surreal; she explicitly invokes that school in stories like “Exquisite Bachelor,” a nod to the exquisite corpse game favored by surrealists; the story itself imagines central figures of surrealism, from Dalí to Breton, competing on the reality show The Bachelor. The collection is bookended by two long stories: The opener, “Medusa’s Garden,” concerns a love triangle among the Guild of the Living Statues. In the closer, “O Lost,” a lovelorn professor meets a mysterious smuggler and her motley crew of friends who force the professor to question the very nature of reality. If any art is subjective, funny art is doubly so. Smyles’ jokes miss their mark as often as they land, partly due to the long, sometimes nearly hallucinatory tangents that pervade the collection, which can feel like Smyles merely writing for her own amusement. But at their best, the stories are erudite, original, and surprisingly poignant, as in the memorable “Contemporary Grammar,” in which a love story is told entirely through diagrammed sentences on a fifth grade English test.
An entertainingly eclectic, if self-indulgent, journey through the odder corners of existence.
