Great Stories of the Sea brings together the best stories of coastal life. When whaling was the continent's high-tech industry, the coast was America's Silicon Valley, and before anyone heard of Yukon gold, there was the rush for fish and timber along Newfoundland's rugged shore. The seaboards are a storyteller's paradise, a hothouse of history and sea-bound adventure.

Great Stories of the Sea includes stories both historic and contemporary. It offers portraits of fishermen and their families' harbor lives, of working people and city life. The lifeline for all the writers collected here is the ocean's edge. There's Stephen Crane, Frank Stockton, Norman Duncan, Thomas Raddall, Alistair Macleod, Silver Donald Cameron and many more with blustery tales about ready ships and sailors longing to put to sea.

Editor Norman Ravvin is a writer of fiction, criticism and journalism His books include Not Quite Mainstream, Cafe's des Westens, and Hidden Canada (all with Red Deer Press), as well as Lola by Night, Sex, Skyscrapers, and Standard Yiddish, and A House of Words: Jewish Writing, Identity, and Memory. He has also edited the short story collection Great Stories of the Sea. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Canadian magazines and on the CBC.