Iris Has Free Time

Fresh out of college and on her own in Manhattan, Iris narrates an exuberant, comic and wistful picaresque about the struggles of growing up. A touching evocation of youth in its twilight, a celebration and also a farewell, Iris Has Free Time is a paean to the beauty, sadness and joys of youth on the long eve of adulthood. Whether passed out drunk in The New Yorker¹s cartoon office where she¹s interning; tanking her first job interview, assigning Cliff’s Notes when hired to teach humanities at a local college; aspiring to write the great American novel but settling for a blog about her ex-boyfriend’s penis instead; trying to piece together the events of yet another puzzling blackout—“I prefer to call them pinkouts, because I’m a girl”—Iris is never short on misadventures. From the quarter life crisis to the shock of turning 30, Iris charts a madcap, melancholic course through her rocky entry into the real world. Reminiscent of Lena Dunham’s Girls and in the tradition of Elaine Dundy’s Sally Jay Gorce and Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly, Iris is a new American anti-heroine, a unique voice treating age-old subjects of love, sex, work and identity with a freshness and originality that will startle and charm.

Iris Smyles has contributed to Nerve, New York Press, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Guernica, KGB BarLit, and BOMB among other publications, as well as several anthologies. She edited and wrote the afterword for The Capricious Critic, (Otis Books 2010), a collection of humor essays she commissioned for her web-zine, Smyles & Fish, was awarded the Doris Lippman Prize for fiction, the Adria Schwartz Award for Women's Fiction, the Geraldine Griffin Moore Short Story Award and the Meyer Cohen Essay Award, and is a frequent contributor to Splice Today. She lives in New York.