Guess what: Alice Munro is back this year, along with the poet P.K. Page, Leon Rooke, Dave Margoshes and Mark Anthony Jarman. Almost more exciting is the first appearance of Matt Lennox, who is said to be thinking of joining the Army. (Our advice: think again.) André Narbonne writes a story in the manner of Conrad about being trapped in Arctic ice. Bill Gaston writes of a teenager who escapes from his mother and finds surprising reassurance in a pair of country musicians. Next year, Douglas Glover plans to retire and spend his days sleeping in the grass, where he'll dream of all the wonderful stories he's chosen for us in Best Canadian Stories.

Contributors: P.K. Page, Alice Munro, Mark Anthony Jarman, André Narbonne, Matt Lennox, Dave Margoshes, Bill Gaston, Leon Rooke, David Helwig, Patrick Lane

P.K. Page is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Her most recent publication is Hand Luggage: A Memoir in Verse. Forthcoming are The Filled Pen: Selected Non-Fiction and Up on the Roof, a collection of stories. Under the name of P.K. Irwin, her paintings appear in a number of collections including the AGO and the National Gallery.

Alice Munro is one of Canada's best-known writers. Her most recent book is The View from Castle Rock. Many of her stories have first appeared in The New Yorker. Alice Munro lives with her husband in a small town in southern Ontario.

Mark Anthony Jarman has published two collections of stories, New Orleans Is Sinking and 19 Knives, and a travel book, Ireland's Eye. His hockey novel Salvage King Ya! is on Amazon.ca's list of 50 Essential Canadian Books, and he has won the Gold Medal at the National Magazine Awards. He is the fiction editor of Fiddlehead and teaches at UNB.

Andre Narbonne teaches English at the University of Windsor. His stories and poems have been published in the Antigonish Review, Pottersfield Portfolio and Queen's Quarterly. His first career was as a marine engineer, and "The Advancements"---which won the Atlantic Writing Contest---is loosely based on his experiences working on bulk carriers, oil tankers and hydrographic and fishery-patrol vessels.

Matt Lennox grew up in Orillia, Ontario, but moved to Toronto to study film and video production at York University. He is currently driving a truck in Toronto while waiting for an application for full-time service in the Canadian Forces. "Men of Salt, Men of Earth" is his first published work, and was inspired by backpacking misadventures in Australia.

Dave Margoshes lives in Regina. He has published both fiction and poetry, as well as a biography of Tommy Douglas. His novel Drowning Man appeared in 2003. He has written four books of stories, and a new collection is forthcoming in 2007. This is his sixth appearance in Best Canadian Stories.

This is my last edition of Best Canadian Stories . I am putting myself out to pasture where I will sleep in the grass and dream of all the wonderful stories I have discovered over the past decade. Believe me, they are the stuff dreams are made of. This year I am pleased to have Matt Lennox’s “Men of Salt, Men of Earth.” It’s his first published story, and the bio note included in The Danforth Review where the story appeared indicates that, at loose ends, Lennox is thinking of joining the army. I have two words of advice: Think again. Already Lennox is an artist with huge narrative drive and a knack for oddly precise diction. A wild boar, trapped in the Australian outback and about to be slaughtered, is “a slobbering and growling trifurcate of living flesh, rolling in the red dust.” I would have put Alice Munro in the book every year if her editors had let me. This time we have “The View from Castle Rock,” a gorgeous story about three generations of a Scots emigrant family crossing the Atlantic in 1818 to come to Canada . Brilliant characterization and thematic weaving render the family a microcosm of Old World culture shifting to the new. I also found in the quarterly Exile a humanely generous and witty little story by the poet P.K. Page. In “Eatings,” a well-meaning diplomat’s wife from an unnamed African country makes a gloriously comic shambles of new customs and protocol. Patrick Lane contributes “Wasps,” a tour-de-force one stunning sentence long about a boy finding wisdom and mystery, death and perhaps a vision of God, in the wild mountains of British Columbia . Leon Rooke’s “Balduchi’s Who’s Who” is a frothy mix of Kensington Market cityscape, sex and inspired metafiction: three great story writers, Guy de Maupassant, Isaac Babel and God, squabble and grouse in an Odessa bar. David Helwig does a romantic turn in “Wakefulness,” the story of a war-blinded old man who dreams of a naked woman in a gondola. Waking up, he recalls the real story: how a mysterious woman known as Milady found him broken and forgotten in a military hospital in England and contrived to take the wounded soldier on a journey through an exhausted Europe to Venice to heal him with her love. Bill Gaston’s story “The Night Window” is about a disaffected teenage boy who wanders off into the British Columbia forest to escape his love-addled mother and her new boyfriend. Astonishingly, the boy finds camaraderie and even wisdom in the form of a pair of funky country musicians turned pot growers. “Bix’s Trumpet” by Dave Margoshes follows the sad, downward spiral of a brilliant, promising drunk whose father once won Bix Beiderbecke’s trumpet in a crap game. In André Narbonne’s Conrad-esque “The Advancements,” an oil tanker is trapped in the ice off Newfoundland with a polar bear hunting nearby and a melancholy wheelsman bent on suicide. “The Advancements” is a lovely amalgam of Arctic mystery, shipboard claustrophobia and human misery, the death in life of those who have already given up. And, finally, a piece of vintage Mark Anthony Jarman, one of the wild men of Canadian fiction: “Winter Coat, Winter Count (Assiniboia Death Trip)” is a phantasmagorical account of the Battle of Little Big Horn, nineteenth-century hat fashions, the death of Crazy Horse, love and much more.     Douglas Glover