“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
“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
“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 a 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
“Delightfully weird.”
—Splice Today
“A genre buster: literature meets analytic cubism… Droll Tales is the kind of book that transmits a joy the reader wants to pass on to another. Its drollery is infectious.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
Welcome to the world of Droll Tales, in which reality is a mutually agreed upon illusion, and life is Painful, paradoxical, beautiful, and brief.
“If you’ve never heard of the entertaining, sometimes wildly funny, off-beat writer Iris Smyles, it may be because she tends to shun traditional PR or mock it…. For all the absurdity and antics, Smyles — with a "y" — 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…. “Droll” Tales is full of oddball fun and carnival-like exploration of The Human Condition.”
—NPR
“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
"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
“Droll Tales is dark, surreal, and very funny, one of the best combinations a reader could ask for.”
—Roz Chast
“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
“[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
“A book of wonders. Brilliant.”
—Frederic Tuten
"Erudite, original, and surprisingly poignant. . . . An entertainingly eclectic . . . journey through the odder corners of existence."
—Kirkus Reviews
“This is the book God would read if God existed. I am in awe of what a great great writer Iris Smyles is.”
—Patricia Marx