Droll Tales, Iris Smyles
Droll Tales, Iris Smyles
List: $19.95 | Sale: $13.97
Club: $9.97

Droll Tales

Author: Iris Smyles

Narrator: Hillary Huber, Tavia Gilbert, Jonathan Davis, Emily Lawrence

Unabridged: 9 hr 55 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/21/2022

Synopsis

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

About Iris Smyles

Iris Smyles is the author of several books, including Dating Tips for the Unemployed, which was a semi-finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Her short stories have been awarded the Geraldine Griffin Moore Award, the Adria Schwartz Award, and the Dorris Lipman Prize, among others. 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.

About Hillary Huber

Hillary Huber is one of the most successful voice talents in Los Angeles. Recent books read for Blackstone Audio include Him, Her, Him Again, the End of Him by Patricia Marx, A Field of Darkness by Cornelia Read, and A Map of Glass by Jane Urquhart.

About Tavia Gilbert

Tavia Gilbert is an acclaimed narrator of more than four hundred full-cast and multivoice audiobooks for virtually every publisher in the industry. Named the 2018 Voice of Choice by Booklist magazine, she is also winner of the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. She has earned numerous Earphones Awards, a Voice Arts Award, and a Listen-Up Award. Audible.com has named her a Genre-Defining Narrator: Master of Memoir. In addition to voice acting, she is an accomplished producer, singer, and theater actor. She is also a producer, singer, photographer, and a writer, as well as the cofounder of a feminist publishing company, Animal Mineral.

About Jonathan Davis

Jonathan Davis has received widespread critical acclaim for his narration in a variety of genres. He has won the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration in 2009, 2011, and 2012, as well as being a finalist for an Audie in 2007, 2013, and three times in 2014. He has also garnered accolades from Publishers Weekly, USA Today, and AudioFile magazine.

About Emily Lawrence

Emily Lawrence, an actor and writer, is passionate about bringing stories to life. She has narrated more than 425 audiobooks, many of which were USA Today or New York Times bestsellers, and has also worked in film, television, and theater.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Iris on July 01, 2022

Dear Reader, “Melancholy is the happiness of being sad,” Victor Hugo wrote, which is, I think, an apt entry to my new book, Droll Tales. Like the circus marching into town, offering with its spectacle a few hours reprieve from one’s worries, the first promise of this book is to entertain. Droll Tales......more

Goodreads review by Matthew on June 29, 2022

There's a funny collage on the cover of this book - two Victorian figures with the heads of African (perhaps) masks that look like they're old photos from a museum collection. A juxtaposition of manners and colonialism on a red settee with a background of airplane safety manuals and images of exotic......more

Goodreads review by Katie on August 05, 2024

I loved it!! It was unlike any other book I’ve read before, which I think is what was so captivating about it. I didn’t really know what was going on half the time, but I also didn’t care or mind because that felt like the way the book is.......more

Goodreads review by Jeff on July 29, 2022

Proudly weird, unabashedly funny, and unexpectedly emotional. If you are the kind of person who loves structural games and language play (all with emerging, surprising depth) then you will love the stories told via fortune cookie fortunes or grammar school sentence diagrams or fictitious glossaries......more

Goodreads review by Sean McGurr on June 22, 2022

It's been quite a bit since I've read anything as original and strange as Iris Smyles's Droll Tales, a loosely connected collection of stories, exercises, and pieces of writing that have a unique point of view. Surrealistic stories following young people in New York City; a ballerina turned stewarde......more

Quotes

“Exhibits many elements of absurdist fiction: daft humor, illogical juxtapositions, the philosophizing of the banal, an obsession with meaninglessness.” 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

“Innovative—filled with surrealistic imagery, dark comedy, and people unmoored in their lives.” Foreword Reviews

“[A] journey through the odder corners of existence.” Kirkus Reviews

“Reading Droll Tales, 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

“A book full of wonders. Brilliant.” Frederic Tuten, author of Tintin in the New World

“Droll Tales is dark, surreal, and very funny, one of the best combinations a reader could ask for.” Roz Chast, New York Times bestselling author

Awards

  • Voice Arts Award
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