The many stories featured in this volume of Best Gay Stories focus on what we, as gay men have in common, what underlies and nourishes the roots of all that fabulous diversity. Stories about our shared experience of those oh-so troubling and conflicted pleasures: desire, longing and love. This is not in itself all that remarkable given one is a gay man - fundamentally -because one desires other men. Desire is constituent of our identity. Acknowledging the truth of that assertion, however, shouldn't be taken as limiting the possibilities of desire itself; editor Peter Dube doesn't mean to suggest that every one of the stories in this year's collection is necessarily erotic (though some are.) These stories are more complicated than that and they vividly demonstrate that love and longing are both subtle and protean. They point to how human beings desire so much and for so much.

Editor Peter Dube questions the representations of gay men's lives found in the general media that present gay life and culture as some monolithic structure--that we all go to the same bars, shop in the same stores, eat in the same restaurants, hold the same kinds of political opinions, have similar backgrounds, and work the same kinds of jobs (more often than not urban, and vaguely white-collar.) He has collected authors who have stepped up the proverbial microphone to tell stories that are different through unique voices. Proof that we have moved well past the sentimental coming out story, the boy-meets-boy romance, the dangers and pleasures of sexual adventure, and we have done it without having to abandon them--because those things still happen and are still important. But we have found new ways of thinking about them, and have more experience to share, a deeper understanding of them, and we have added an array of other stories, from other parts of our lives, and dreams, and troubles to them. We have moved past the "gay story" and towards "gay stories." In these pages are a magnificent assortment of narratives and an equally fabulous range of ways of narrating them. The book includes experimental work and traditional tales, fantasy and realism, and as many different perspectives as one might hope to find.

Jonathan Reid Sevigny was born and raised in Cowansville, in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, a culture so unique and full of rare and local treasures that become significant to those who grew up there but perhaps seem completely foreign and often tacky to outsiders. It isn't the most glamorous town, nor does it have any particular sites or landmarks that one would go out of his / her way to visit. In Sweetsburg Sevigny is attempting to use his Quebecois boyhood as an archetype for the relationship between the individual, the hometown, and the bewildering beauty that connects the two. As adults, we tend to romanticize our youth, we try and remember the best things about our coming of age, but we're also scarred by certain events which we wish we could go back and change; fight back, kiss back. At a glance Sevigny's depictions of Cowansville seem crisply utopian, a neat little playground of nice boys and girls. However, a closer look reveals their human forms are corrupt, splayed, eaten, and absorbed by animal fraternities, by swords of ritualistic death, by minute veils of the macrocosmic sky in all its unknown intricacies. The scene becomes otherworldly in the kid's play, pushing us to remember that what is around and inside is both innocent and dirty, violent and soft, and constantly revised.

Evoking hidden worlds, summoning visions and making magic happen, Conjure: A Book Of Spells is filled with vivid images and tantalizing narrative fragments that stir the heart, mind and eye. Echoing the tone and structure of Medieval and Renaissance grimoires, Dube's unique collection joins surrealist automatism with rigorous formal discipline and offers readers a profound and complex work. Peter Dube is the author of four other books: Hovering World, At the Bottom of the Sky, Subtle Bodies: a Fantasia on Voice, History and Rene Crevel, which was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award, and most recently the novel The City's Gates. He is also the editor of three anthologies of contemporary writing. His essays and critical writings have been widely published in journals such as CV Photo, ESSE, Hour and Ashe, and in exhibition publications for various galleries, among them SKOL, Occurrence, Quartier Ephemere and the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery of Concordia University. He lives in Montreal.

Stolen Treasure is the history of corporate America's most exclusive hideaway paradise, the magnificent Restigouche River Basin. The author explain how these corporate GIANTS have manipulate government and agentcies, scientific environmental reports and the scheme to gain total control over our federations and foundations for personal gains. You will be informed about Atlantic Canada's history; of the conspiracy to control the North Atlantic Fisheries; of the who's who orchestrating the saga of the seal hunting ban; of the outrageous gains by the American elites at the detriment of the poor and neady; of unaccountable horrendous environmental crimes; of the destruction of our forests and rivers; of the collapse of the North Atlantic fisheries and how mega environmental polluters have managed to rob us of our natural herritage.

It is Paris, 1935, and the poet Rene Crevel (with whatever accent mark) has turned on the gas stove in his apartment. As death fills the rooms, Crevel dwells on past events that changed his life and ended the peace among the Surrealists. Years earlier, Crevel enacted seances for Andre Breton and his guests. At first, these performances were fraudulent, but soon Crevel found himself overcome with lapses in memory and time. Portents made during the seances came to pass as Breton's friends fell under a morbid influence. While in a trance, Crevel felt his sense of self expand to new levels, subtle bodies of consciousness. Beings he named "Interlocuters" began to whisper to him of other worlds, other times. What at first feels like a revelation soon brings Crevel to the depths of despair. In this fantastical biography of Crevel, accomplished Canadian author Peter Dube, explores the famed poet's desires of flesh and verse and experience.