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Fiction Short Stories (single Author)

Dance Moves of the Near Future

by (author) Tim Conley

Publisher
New Star Books
Initial publish date
May 2015
Category
Short Stories (single author), Black Humor, Literary
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781554201051
    Publish Date
    May 2015
    List Price
    $9.99
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781554200979
    Publish Date
    May 2015
    List Price
    $18.00

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Description

Tim Conley's prose whipsaws between carefully observed realism and fantastic absurdity to create surreal, compact worlds. Whether they're sketching the familial fallout of a stentorian patriarch or teaching the eponymous dance moves to survivors of the apocalypse ("With the rise of the invertebrates, spinelessness has never been so hip"), these stories are all marked by precise, engaging prose, dark humour, and a demented imagination. The 23 stories in Dance Moves of the Near Future open with a sentient cactus and close with a crash of rhinos. In between you'll find a high-strung parrot, untenured yahoos, an amorphous, mind-controlling blob, optometrists in a strip club, a dash of Old Testament shenanigans, and weighty ontological concerns. These stories are unpredictable — even volatile — but they all share a wicked sense of humour, and a piercing eye for human (and inhuman) fallibility.

"Dance Moves of the Near Future is a collection of the strange and wonderful. Someplace between Bender and Barthelme is Conley: exhibiting humour, imagination, and total command."

— Emily Schultz, author of The Blondes

About the author

Tim Conley's recent books include the poetry collection One False Move (2012), Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity (edited, with Jed Rasula, 2012), and Nothing Could be Further: Thirty Stories (2011). He teaches English at Brock University, and has published widely on Joyce, Nabokov, and other aspects of twentieth-century literature.

Tim Conley's profile page