Transformation, identity, and speech that conceals and misleads as much as it explains form the core of these fourteen linked stories and novelettes. We are guided through them by "Iris" and her friend "Jacob," who, over the course of the book, appear in a variety of guises. They introduce, interact with, or inhabit various characters, each with their own stories to tell. In the romantic, dark, and sometimes surreal worlds they occupy, the commonplace is beautiful and often absurd, reality is a mutually agreed upon illusion, and life is painful, comic, paradoxical, and brief.A young American woman treks through Europe's great cities working as a living statue; a renowned Chekhov tale is at 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 heartbreak is told through sentence diagrams on a fifth...

In twenty-four absurd, lyrical, and louche episodes, "Iris Smyles" weaves a modern odyssey of trying to find one's home in the world amid the pitfalls and insidious traps of adult life. A wickedly funny picaresque touching on quantum physics, the Donner Party, arctic exploration, Greek mythology, Rocky I, II, V, IV, VI, and III respectively, and literary immortality, Dating Tips for the Unemployed is a wistful if wry ode to that awkward age—between birth and death—when you think you know what you want but aren't quite sure what you're doing.