Best Gay Stories 2010 - Softcover

The collection starts with a story Anthony McDonald's sweet, romantic tale of a brief affair between two Shakespearian actors in ''Mercutio's Romeo'' then glides into essay territory with Paul Lisicky's ''Two Tales'' and Jeff Mann's ''Loving Tim; or My Passionate Midlife Affair,'' a thoughtful exploration of Mann's infatuation with country music superstar Tim McGraw. This round of essays ends with another take on fandom, Nowell Briscoe's portrait of gay Southern author Lonnie Coleman in ''Lonnie Coleman Remembered.''

Then it's back to fiction with a chilling first person account of a public park hookup gone terribly wrong with G. Winston James' ''Somewhere Nearby.'' This is a perfect example of blurring that border between truth and fiction. From its opening line, ''I am a corpse being dragged to shallow burial,'' we fervently hope this is a story but deep down we realize that in a world where a slight, small man like Matthew Shepard can be tied to a barbed wire fence and tortured to death, it could be all too real.

D. Travers Scott's brilliant ''It's Not You'' both blurs and delineates, alternating sections titled ''Fiction'' and ''Journal'' as he gives an account of an ''affair'' between the story's narrator and a straight boy. While not exactly idyllic, the fictional portions are more romanticized than the shorter, straightforward journal entries, but the shorter passages certainly contain more ''truths'' about their relationship.

Some of my other favorites include Wayne Hoffman's ''Duncan,'' a bittersweet story of unrequited love, Lewis DeSimone's ''Auntie Mame,'' a wonderful ode to one of my top five movies of all time... Lee Thomas' hysterically harrowing ''Crack Smokin' Grandpa'' and Sean Meriwether's heartfelt ''So Long Anita Bryant, and Thanks for Everything.''

But these are among the pieces that spoke to my truths. Of the twenty well-chosen selections, you're bound to find many that you'll remember until Best Gay Stories 2011 when our brightest voices will carry us away once again. --Jerry Wheeler for Out in Print

Unlike most ''best stories'' anthologies, the series edited by Berman for the past three years incorporates essays as well as fiction. Best Gay Writing, then, is what readers will find and while no one book can wholly represent all of a year's good queer prose, there aren't any clunkers here. There are selections from blogs: ''In History's Vicinity,'' Richard Bowes' personal account from Mumpsimus of being Stonewall Riot-adjacent as a young man; from magazines: ''Two Sides of a Boy,'' Phillip Tang s elegant short story from Chroma 9, about an Asian's man s down-low life: from non-fiction collections: ''Death in Venice,'' Christopher Bram's vibrant essay extolling the novel of the same name, from 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everyone Must Read, and ''Lonnie Coleman Remembered,'' Nowell Briscoe's warm remembrance of reading and meeting an author who changed his life, from The Golden Age of Gay Fiction; and, of course, from fiction collections: Anthony McDonald's jaunty ''Mercutio s Romeo,'' from Boy Crazy, and Jameson Currier's sinuous ''The Theatre Bug,'' from The Haunted Heart. Good reads, all. --Books Marks by Richard Labonte