Droll Tales
(eAudiobook)

Grouping Information

Book Cover Information

Hoopla Extract Information

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(
    [year] => 2022
    [artist] => Iris Smyles
    [fiction] => 1
    [coverImageUrl] => https://cover.hoopladigital.com/bsa_9798200927340_270.jpeg
    [titleId] => 15643896
    [isbn] => 9798200927364
    [abridged] => 
    [language] => ENGLISH
    [profanity] => 
    [title] => Droll Tales
    [demo] => 
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    [duration] => 9h 56m 0s
    [children] => 
    [artists] => Array
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            [0] => stdClass Object
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                    [name] => Iris Smyles
                    [relationship] => AUTHOR
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            [1] => stdClass Object
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                    [name] => Jonathan Davis
                    [relationship] => READER
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            [2] => stdClass Object
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                    [name] => Emily Lawrence
                    [relationship] => READER
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            [3] => stdClass Object
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                    [name] => Tavia Gilbert
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            [4] => stdClass Object
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                    [name] => Hillary Huber
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    [genres] => Array
        (
            [0] => Comedy
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    [price] => 2.49
    [id] => 15643896
    [edited] => 
    [kind] => AUDIOBOOK
    [active] => 1
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    [synopsis] => 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. 
	"Exhibits many elements of absurdist fiction: daft humor, illogical juxtapositions, the philosophizing of the banal, an obsession with meaninglessness." 
	"[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." 
	"Innovative-filled with surrealistic imagery, dark comedy, and people unmoored in their lives." 
	"[A] journey through the odder corners of existence." 
	"Reading Droll Tales, I am in awe of what a great great great great writer Iris Smyles is." 
	"A book full of wonders. Brilliant." 
	"Droll Tales is dark, surreal, and very funny, one of the best combinations a reader could ask for."
    [url] => https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/15643896
    [pa] => 
    [publisher] => Blackstone Publishing
    [purchaseModel] => INSTANT
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