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The Dali Squiggle
Life is not a straight line, but a squiggle. Alex Dante is not quite living the dream as he tends a bar in Madrid, but he knows life could be worse. The right señorita would be perfect, he thinks, but then falls for the wrong one.Optimistic, or foolish, or both.Aided as well as hindered by his strange friend Nuria Hidalgo, Alex refuses to stop chasing dreams that doggedly elude his pursuit. There must be a way to reclaim them, and the endless roads of Spain provide a few pointers; like life itself, they don’t follow straight lines, only squiggles.
206 pages, Paperback
First published March 3, 2024
About the author
Nick Sweeney
17 books30 followersI'm a writer of fiction, mainly, and have published lots of short stories, many of them finding a home in print and all over the web.
I also write novels and novellas, and my latest one is called The Fortune Teller's Factotum. It looks at an intense and unlikely friendship between two young women that reveals dark secrets about their families. It was published in October 2023 by Hear Our Voice LLC, a new US publisher.
2022's Cleopatra's Script is the longest book I have written, at 160000 words. It was published by Golden Storyline Books. Set in Rome in the mid-1990s, it tells the story of how a couple's romance is compromised by the diversion of the murder of a Gypsy child, and their knowledge of it.
My novelette The Émigré Engineer was published in October 2021 by Ploughshares, a chapbook publisher under the wing of Boston Mass. Emerson College. It's about a young man who dodges the flying bullets of the Russian Revolution to 'become an American' eventually, during the time of Prohibition, when there were plenty of bullets flying. It's available from here as a download, or in print as part of the Ploughshares Fall 2021 Omnibus.
My novella A Blue Coast Mystery, Almost Solved. came out in October 2020 with Addison and Highsmith, an imprint of Histria Books. It's set in London in the 1970s and on the French Riviera in the 1960s, among an expatriate community that often remains unseen, and is partly a story about people from places that no longer exist. You can see more about it here. It is available now from Amazon, using this link. You can also get it directly from Histria Books at this link.
In the summer of 2018, I had my then second-longest piece of work, The Exploding Elephant, published by Bards and Sages under its Society of Misfits outlet. Like much of my work, it is set in Poland, in this case in Gliwice, the town where I lived in 1993. It's a piece of speculative fiction centring on a young opportunist whose bad choices are gradually coming home to him. At around 20000 words, it's a 'novelette' - a bit shorter than a novella. It's currently out of print, and the rights have reverted to me so I'm looking into getting it republished in some other way.
My first novel was published in April 2011 by Unthank Books. It's called Laikonik Express, and follows two American slackers on a haunted jaunt around Poland in search of a woman one of them has met. The Laikonik Express is the name of the train taking them on their way, which runs from Krakow in the south, to Gdynia in the north, on the Baltic Sea. There are a few pages on this site devoted to various aspects of it.
I post links to my published short stories on my website The Last Thing the Author Said, or sometimes the stories themselves. I also post unpublished writing, some of it unpublishable maybe, and some of it just works-in-progress, or stasis, and will welcome comments, criticism, creative derision and crisps.
Be in touch - it's good to talk, apparently. Find me on Facebook, which is a either a complete waste of time or just a partial one. I can also be tweeted @nikone3na though I've not been partaking in Twitter very much recently. That's the same as my often neglected Instagram handle.
I also write novels and novellas, and my latest one is called The Fortune Teller's Factotum. It looks at an intense and unlikely friendship between two young women that reveals dark secrets about their families. It was published in October 2023 by Hear Our Voice LLC, a new US publisher.
2022's Cleopatra's Script is the longest book I have written, at 160000 words. It was published by Golden Storyline Books. Set in Rome in the mid-1990s, it tells the story of how a couple's romance is compromised by the diversion of the murder of a Gypsy child, and their knowledge of it.
My novelette The Émigré Engineer was published in October 2021 by Ploughshares, a chapbook publisher under the wing of Boston Mass. Emerson College. It's about a young man who dodges the flying bullets of the Russian Revolution to 'become an American' eventually, during the time of Prohibition, when there were plenty of bullets flying. It's available from here as a download, or in print as part of the Ploughshares Fall 2021 Omnibus.
My novella A Blue Coast Mystery, Almost Solved. came out in October 2020 with Addison and Highsmith, an imprint of Histria Books. It's set in London in the 1970s and on the French Riviera in the 1960s, among an expatriate community that often remains unseen, and is partly a story about people from places that no longer exist. You can see more about it here. It is available now from Amazon, using this link. You can also get it directly from Histria Books at this link.
In the summer of 2018, I had my then second-longest piece of work, The Exploding Elephant, published by Bards and Sages under its Society of Misfits outlet. Like much of my work, it is set in Poland, in this case in Gliwice, the town where I lived in 1993. It's a piece of speculative fiction centring on a young opportunist whose bad choices are gradually coming home to him. At around 20000 words, it's a 'novelette' - a bit shorter than a novella. It's currently out of print, and the rights have reverted to me so I'm looking into getting it republished in some other way.
My first novel was published in April 2011 by Unthank Books. It's called Laikonik Express, and follows two American slackers on a haunted jaunt around Poland in search of a woman one of them has met. The Laikonik Express is the name of the train taking them on their way, which runs from Krakow in the south, to Gdynia in the north, on the Baltic Sea. There are a few pages on this site devoted to various aspects of it.
I post links to my published short stories on my website The Last Thing the Author Said, or sometimes the stories themselves. I also post unpublished writing, some of it unpublishable maybe, and some of it just works-in-progress, or stasis, and will welcome comments, criticism, creative derision and crisps.
Be in touch - it's good to talk, apparently. Find me on Facebook, which is a either a complete waste of time or just a partial one. I can also be tweeted @nikone3na though I've not been partaking in Twitter very much recently. That's the same as my often neglected Instagram handle.
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