Love and Other Sorrows: A conversation with Iris Smyles and Frederic Tuten

159 Main Street,East Hampton NY 11937

12 July, 2022

Description

Having drawn comparisons to such disparate figures as Fran Lebowitz, Edith Wharton, and James Joyce, Iris Smyles’ irreverent stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Vogue, BOMB, Paris Review Daily, The Baffler, and Best American Travel Writing. Now, in DROLL TALES (Turtle Point Press; July 5, 2022), Smyles moves the spotlight off her eponymous anti-heroine from her earlier books, Dating Tips for the Unemployed (a semi-finalist for the Thurber Prize) and Iris Has Free Time, to illuminate a wider and more mysterious world. Acting here as a sort of literary P.T. Barnum, she draws back the curtain on a wondrous variety show: an oddball menagerie of melancholy heroes in fabulous adventures that range from the mundane to the marvelous. Occasionally the author appears among them donning various guises—as narrator, supporting character, doppelganger, or distant figure—but more often these characters speak for themselves as they explore themes of time, loss, love, art, and the sanctity and absurdity of life itself. Moving, surreal, characteristically witty, and sly, DROLL TALES is more than anything original. While referencing movements in art, history, philosophy, science, and even the occult, the characters here speak in their own language (pig Latin may be the only way to truly appreciate and understand Mallarmé, you will learn) and with their own logic, showing us another world overlapping this one, one in which reality is a mutually agreed-upon illusion, life is a Ponzi scheme, love a paradox, and sorrow our only constant. Yet this same world, as in our own, is where we find joy. IRIS SMYLES is the author of Iris Has Free Time (Soft Skull Press, 2013), which Forbes called, “an instant classic… a smart, funny, wise, and sometimes heartbreaking book about a slowly fizzling love affair with youth,” and Dating Tips for the Unemployed (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), a semi-finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Vogue, BOMB, Paris Review Daily, The Baffler, and Best American Travel Writing, among other publications. Droll Tales (Turtle Point Press, July 5, 2022) is her third book. Frederic Tuten is the award-winning author of five novels, including The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, The Green Hour, and Tintin in the New World, selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year, as well as a memoir, My Young Life, and a book of interwoven short stories, Self Portraits: Fictions. His stories have received three Pushcart Prizes and an O'Henry Prize for fiction. His latest collection of stories, The Bar at Twilight (Bellevue Literary Press), was released in May. Images by Chris Stein and Mark Segal