Iris-the narrator and heroine-guides the reader through twenty-four episodes from her life, pausing now and then for meditations on love, sex, work, loneliness, insomnia, arctic exploration, cannibalism, the Higgs boson, Greek mythology, memory, costumes parties, time travel,#160;Rocky I, II, V, IV, VI, and#160;III#160;respectively, literary immortality, real estate trends, and growing up and growing old. Evoking the screwball heroines of a bygone era as she often finds herself a little lost in her own, Iris ventures blithely into the future, and Smyles collects the flotsam of her past. An encyclopedic, absurd, lyrical, and louche picaresque about that awkward age-between birth and death-when you feel like you don’t know at all what you’re doing.

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; Mallarme 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.