Whatever Happens

✍ Scribed by Tim Conley

• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 179
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This is a collection of stories for people who feel that reality is not the best deal going. Tim Conley explores the fragility of our perceptions as well as the illusions that we so badly need. Sometimes spare, these sixteen stories move between the obsessive and the disinterested, the extraordinary and the humdrum. In "Means to an End", a man who has not quite come to the end of his rope meets a woman who wants to borrow it; in "Constellation", an unforeseen meteorite destroys an astrologists' convention; a taciturn botanist confronts his unfaithful wife in "The Greenhouse Effect"; and in "Last One In", an argument about which man has the better sense of hearing ends in disaster. Influenced by - but expanding upon - the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Raymond Queneau, and the European avant-garde, Conley's work combines realism with metaphysical concerns to create a comedic, yet always striking, first collection of fictions.

✦ Table of Contents

Front cover......Page 1
whatever happens pages......Page 2
Contents......Page 8
Means to an End......Page 10
Constellation......Page 18
The Tip......Page 26
Way to Go......Page 38
Good Faith......Page 44
Solacium......Page 54
The Watch......Page 60
The greenhouse effect......Page 68
The Annotated Affair......Page 78
Doubt’s Dream......Page 86
An Unlikely Sequence......Page 94
Checking......Page 100
Plot......Page 112
In the meantime......Page 120
A country called Roughage......Page 136
Privileged Motions......Page 144
Caught in the Act......Page 154
Loss of an Icon......Page 164
Last One In......Page 170
Acknowledgments......Page 178
Back cover......Page 179