The short story form is unambiguously un-dead in this new album of thirty fictions from Tim Conley, coming at the reader in a variety of shapes and guises running the gamut from elliptical micro-fictions to tales of the inexplicable.

Steeped in Beckett, Borges and Nabokov, Conley's multiple universes allow for werewolves that excite ridicule not fear, and where birthdays are an occasion for forgetting not remembering. Here, the world greets a new colouring book with the same seriousness as it might some newly discovered gospel, and struggles to embrace fictional celebrities with the same ardour it reserves for real ones. And why not a variant of origami that is used on the human form?