Dance Moves of the Near Future

Fiction. 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. Conley's prose whipsaws between carefully observed realism and batshit insanity to create surreal, compact worlds from fine grains of truth. 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.

Tim Conley's recent books include the poetry collection One False Move (2012), BURNING CITY: POEMS OF METROPOLITAN MODERNITY (edited, with Jed Rasula, Action Books, 2012), and Nothing Could be Further: Thirty Stories (2011). He lives in St. Catharines, ON, where he teaches English at Brock University, and has published widely on Joyce, Nabokov, and other topics in twentieth-century literature.