You can purchase Streetcar Dreams in the US from Clarkesworld Books in slipcased hardcover edition or dust jacket hardcover edition, both signed by the author.  In the UK, you can buy the book from PS Publishing.

Five of the six stories in this collection are my 'orphan tales', the ones that didn't end up as chapters in Minions Of The Moon (1999) or From The Files Of The Time Rangers (2005).

The title novella, the World Fantasy Award winning Streetcar Dreams, is a 'Kevin Grierson' story and encapsulates the life and redemption of the gay, addicted, doppelganger-haunted protagonist. It shows up in Minions, but piecemeal as linking material, binding the other nine stories into a Lambda Award winning novel. In this volume we see Streetcar Dreams as it originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Three other stories, 'Someday I Shall Rise and Go', 'Transfigured Night', and 'A Huntsman Passing By', each as Publisher's Weekly said, "showcase (Bowes) signature interest in the strange intersection of fantasy and the drug-fueled 1960s underground."

The two stories, 'Circle Dance' and 'My Life in Speculative Fiction', which bookend the collection share a common first person narrator and structure.

'Circle Dance' recently appeared for the first time in Postscripts #3. Infinity Plus said, "...uses a trick... the telling of another story -- or stories -- within the main story, commenting on and counterpointing the framing story. Bowes pulls this trick off to near-perfection, setting the story of two brothers -- their ups, their downs, their near-death experiences, their relationships -- against a parallel worlds tale being written by one of the brothers, the whole thing approaching the deep, deep hole left in a person's life when a loved one departs from two quite different perspectives. Moving and quite, quite beautiful."

Locus magazine's Faren Miller wrote about 'My Life in Speculative Fiction', "Adventure takes on the emotional force and complexity of life, while life engages heart and soul as compellingly as the best adventure. Bowes shows just what it means to be a writer - caught in the act, using all the resources of his art."

Booklist (Ray Olson) says:

"Streetcar Dreams" is the World Fantasy Award-winning kernel of Bowes' exceptional dark fantasy novel of addiction and recovery, Minions of the Moon (1999). It's a helluva story, about how a gay man went all the way to the bottom when young, faithfully and destructively attended by his doppelganger, but then walked away from addiction and the double, and now, in middle age, hears that his shadow wants to see him again. Its five volume mates have similar settings, periods, plot and character details, themes, structures, and atmosphere, making Bowes seem rather a one-trick pony. But so do William S. Burroughs and John Rechy, two writers Bowes mentions in the semiautobiographical "My Life in Speculative Fiction," which suggests that he knows the Boston, New York, gay hustling, and drugs he writes about all too personally. And the purely fictional pieces have their well-realized distinctions, such as a compelling female protagonist in "Someday I Shall Rise and Go" and a plunge into ghastly horror in "Transfigured Night." Very exciting, somber stuff.

And from Ideomancer:

I was not familiar with Rick Bowes' work when I read Streetcar Dreams and Other Midnight Fancies, but I'll look for it in the future. I started it primarily because Jeffrey Ford wrote the introduction, and finished it because it was good.

Initially the stories blend together as they all bear several hallmarks: gay or at least sexually ambiguous characters, child molestation, promiscuous, anonymous sex and heavy drug use, (but, it should be noted, the sex is usually desperate and neither are at all romanticized), New York and Boston between the 60's and 90's, AIDS and cancer. (Mr. Bowes is a gay male and a cancer survivor. He knows of what he writes.)

But slowly the stories define themselves and while they are have substantial similarities, they are equally separate. Brothers and sisters, but not twins.

The penultimate scene in "Circle Dance" ends with "Writing is the place where I can be as bold and compassionate and wise as I choose," and it seems as if Mr. Bowes himself is talking to us. He writes about being poor, being gay, nearly being killed, watching his brother die. But while it is all of these things, it is also painful, as Mr. Ford says, "Honest." There are no heroes, only survivors.

"Someday I Shall Rise and Go" is something of an anomaly, a story written from a woman's perspective. (And my favorite.) Chris Thayers is a young woman hanging onto her worthless boyfriend (soon to be initiated into heroin and crime) and literally nothing else. Even the clothes she wears are borrowed. But her lack of ownership empowers her and, like a dark, powerful and not at all whimsical Alice, she can move through the looking glass to be a heroine.

"Transfigured Night" is a hard story to read. The Guest (who has no name for a long time and good reason) shows up on the porch of two married friends who live the suburban life, steady and safe jobs, steady and safe sex, home cooking, dinners. Slowly we are drawn into a much darker and much, much more dangerous life of sex, drugs, Satanism of a sort, and snuff films. The story turns on a rather common device, but by then there is nothing common at all (how many stories have you read with explicit sex in snuff films?) and what a jaded reader would think is common is horrific and powerful.

"A Huntsman Passing By" uses a rather common idea - fairy tales from a unique perspective - but in this case it is the huntsman, a figure without a name, a spear (or, I suppose, a bow or crossbow) carrier who is also a private detective. The story takes us through the art world of New York and into the darkest of fairy tale territory: revenge.

"Streetcar Dreams" is my least favorite, perhaps because I'd become somewhat tired of New York and drugs and so forth, but "My Life in Speculative Fiction" is excellent. The narrator (if he has a name, I don't remember and can't find it) discovers blowjobs and maybe love and rebels against ROTC and his father in the late 60s, but through it all he fictionalizes his life: he is Bobby Shafto, a time traveler and hero. It seems at once a statement and a counterargument: Mr. Bowes' stories are both autobiography and fiction (which is which I couldn't begin to guess), but fiction can only shallowly mirror reality in its complexity and tragedy. Don't take his fiction too seriously, the story tells us. But how can we not? His characters are survivors, rarely heroes, men and women who we most certainly would not want to be, living lives we would rather not. (Compare and contrast to other fantastic stories: wouldn't you like to be Frodo or Aragorn, or a wizard or king or whatever?) These are the rarest of speculative fiction stories, the sort that describes (it certainly doesn't prescribe) the darkest parts of our lives and doesn't let up, not once, to tell us that somewhere over the rainbow is a better world. This is all we've got and if there's something else, it sure as hell ain't heaven.

If you're looking for adventure, go somewhere else. If you're looking for a truth (not the truth, but something close), read Rick Bowes.