Early nineties, I hunted hard for a press – the right press – for my slim collection of stories. I was eager and greedy; tossed my little net too many times. But Goose Lane Editions were eager, too, and life turned happy. In 1991, Glover had gone with the Fredericton publisher and won a Governor General’s Award nomination for his short-story collection A Guide to Animal Behaviour. If Glover had published there, they must be good. Small, but good.

Glover returns to Goose Lane with 16 Categories of Desire, his sixth book of fiction. He teaches writing in Saratoga Springs and Vermont and spends time in his other home of Waterford, Ontario. Glover’s national identity may be skittish, but the choice of Goose Lane shows loyalty and nice manners. The gesture is made more dramatic, though, because of Glover’s book: small and awfully good. Gag not at the willowy sweet word, “desire.” He doesn’t mean that desire.

“The first bad category of desire is the desire to have a baby with a man. And the second is to put warm peeled carrots up your ass when you come.”

Eleven stories, few scenes, practically no dialogue. Glover is after something new, and he thinks hard to achieve it. Still, the stories suggest Chekhov, sometimes Nabokov in tone and attitude. We are given defamiliarizing moral tableaus – a psychiatric patient drinks dangerous vodka with a nurse the night of his release; when his three-month-old baby dies, a grieving father begins nasty sexual liaisons with the family doctor. Glover asks that we not judge, but understand.

Incest, for example, becomes just another listing ship in life’s flotilla. We hear a pathetic/ironic/comic/erotic echo of Humbert Humbert in a character who says of his relationship with his sister, “This was our one and only attempt at physical intimacy, and it was unsuccessful (to be precise, I did not attain complete erection, and my bladder sphincter relaxed out of nervousness just as I entered her vagina, causing us both a good deal of embarrassment).” The stories are not all about sex, but everywhere, sex matters.

“[T]he sixth category of desire is for forced sex with large numbers of muscular black men. And the seventh is to run away to Arkansas to join the snake handlers in order to experience the grace of God in this life in an atmosphere of polyester coordinates and primitive country rock music.”

Last year, Glover – who grew up on a tobacco farm in Ontario – published Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, a book of “essays, lectures, dialogues, memoirs” about writing and Canada, and his place in both. That collection, too, is small and awfully good. In it, Glover says, “The place of … the short story is the place where the sparks fly, where skin touches skin, where the self meets the Other (and the first impulse, when you meet an Other, is to run away or kill him or make love to him).” Such are the conflicts in 16 Categories of Desire. And so rich are Glover’s talent and compassion that the conflicts intersect and multiply. Sex and death – their promise and threat – tangle and release in equal, debauched measure.

In his 1989 essay, “The Novel as a Poem,” Glover suggests we read for pattern and not for “aboutness.” Patterns of rhythm, imagery, structure – even punctuation – are the esthetics of writing. In 16 Categories, Glover’s patterns include suicide, cages, infidelity, instant love, evolution and its naughty sister devolution, and French-English conflict. The retrospective and distant narrator recurs. Exposition tells everything. Rates of revelation are manipulated, magical. For some writers, these might be cumbersome narrative kites to fly.

“And the eleventh is for things to be nice.”

The risk is the “concept story”: too much form with the substance of tissue paper. But Glover explores via intellect and flaunts his profound understanding and acceptance of all human desires. So each Glover story is finished. By this I mean that concept unravels at the same careful rate as elements such as plot, character, and theme. Glover’s stories do not rush to reach the “ta-da!” at the end. Instead, he says, “Here’s another detail to help you. Wait. Here’s another one, see?” Glover proves what can happen when an artist cares and then takes time: hefty stories, awfully good.