About BC Books Online
BC Books Online was created for anyone interested in BC-published books, and with librarians especially in mind. We'd like to make it easy for library staff to learn about books from BC publishers - both new releases and backlist titles - so you can inform your patrons and keep your collections up to date.
Our site features print books and ebooks - both new releases and backlist titles - all of which are available to order through regular trade channels. Browse our subject categories to find books of interest or create and export lists by category to cross-reference with your library's current collection.
A quick tip: When reviewing the "Browse by Category" listings, please note that these are based on standardized BISAC Subject Codes supplied by the books' publishers. You will find additional selections, grouped by theme or region, in our "BC Reading Lists."
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
Contributor Notes
Tim Conley’s recent books include the fiction collections Collapsible, Dance Moves of the Near Future (2015), and Nothing Could be Further (2011), and a poetry collection, Unless Acted Upon (2019). He teaches English at Brock University, and has published widely on Joyce, Nabokov, and other aspects of twentieth-century literature.
