Droll tales / Iris Smyles.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Smyles, Iris, author.

Contributor:

Rosengarten Family Fund.

Language:

English

Genre:

short stories.

Humorous fiction.

Short stories.

Physical Description:

xi, 292 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Brooklyn, New York : Turtle Point Press, [2022]

Summary:

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Rosengarten Family Fund.

Other Format:

Online version: Smyles, Iris Droll tales.

ISBN:

9781933527611

1933527617

OCLC:

1264718558