Dance Prone

His book is many things. A giddy rush of indie excess, punk mayhem, outsider art, blurred memory, lapsed existence and sudden grace. A mind-bending trip that plays out in that liminal space between innocence and insanity; drift and purpose; rational and rogue; anarchy and calm; between what was lost and what may endure. Cut with a cast of characters sawn through the bone, language that giddies-up the heart, and always, always, alive with a throbbing pulse that insists you read on. Lyrical. Violent. Elegiac. Epic. I adore David Coventry’s writing and Dance Prone is a magnificent novel. – Alan McMonagle, author of Ithaca. Taught and intelligent, this story of music, trauma and artistic ambition has all the precision, spookiness and elegance of the best post-rock. – Matt Thorne‘What a brute fucken show, man.’ David Coventry’s new novel is a gorgeous panegyric to the purity, poison and impossibly high stakes of punk. A young band of fleeting genius tours the living rooms and crappy bars of early 80’s US before imploding in violence and horror. Dance Prone captures that thing about beautiful doomed brilliance sanctified by its miniature life expectancy. It’s funny, filthy, erudite, and rude, like LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge” as retold by the mid-period DeLillo of The Names and Mao II. – Carl Shuker, author of A MistakeA novel that interrogates music and it’s capacity for producing societal change, the bonds of friendship and family, and the manner in which we avoid confronting ourselves with the truth … An attempt to create the novel in it’s essence: looking for the new, resisting the obvious, denying the familiar. * Red Close blog *Pitch-perfect and nuanced … extraordinary … remarkable … Coventry’s work is some of the finest in recent NZ literature. * Herald (New Zealand) *A transcendental quest through the mind, body and through landscape, and a raw and raging celebration of music … This book is astounding. – Megan Bradbury, author of Everyone is Watching

David Coventry was born in 1969 in New Zealand, where he lives with his wife, the novelist Laura Southgate. Published in over fifteen counties, Coventry’s debut, The Invisible Mile, was hailed in the New York Times as a ‘gorgeous … philosophical action-adventure’, was book of the week in the Sydney Morning Herald. It was described in his home country as ‘one of the most gruelling novels about sport ever written’, one which ‘immediately places David Coventry among the elite of New Zealand authors.’ He received his MA in 2010 from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington where he is currently completing a PhD.