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