Iris Smyles
Iris Smyles is an American writer. Her loosely autobiographical debut novel Iris Has Free Time was published by Soft Skull Press and Dating Tips for the Unemployed, an informal companion novel, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and was a semi-finalist for the 2017 Thurber Prize for American Humor.
Smyles has also contributed stories and essays to The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Vogue, Paris Review Daily, Bomb, Guernica Magazine, New York Press, McSweeney's Internet Tendecy and Best American Travel Writing 2015. She also wrote humorous columns for Nerve, Splice Today, and EAST, The East Hampton Star Magazine.
Smyles was co-founder of the online and print magazine Smyles & Fish, later turned into a "web museum", featuring works by Frederic Tuten, Jerome Charyn, Aurelie Sheehan, Shay K. Azoulay and others. The Capricious Critic by Ari Martin Samsky, a column commissioned for the site, was later published as a book edited and with an afterword by Smyles.
Her writing has been compared to that of Dorothy Parker, James Joyce, Edith Wharton and Fran Lebowitz. She is the literary editor of EAST, The East Hampton Star Magazine.
