Audio only
Length9h 55m
About this audiobook
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; 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.
Audiobook details
Rating★★★★ 4.2 (40)
Includes Goodreads
GenreGeneral Fiction, Humor
Length9 hrs 55 mins
Narrated byHillary Huber, Tavia Gilbert, Jonathan Davis, Emily Lawrence
FormatAudiobook
Publish dateJun 21, 2022
LanguageEnglish
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