Told as a series of interconnected stories, Jane Rule's fifth novel--offering six characters' shifting perspectives--takes us to a place where feminism, creativity, and sexual politics collide  Contract with the World follows a group of friends, artists, and lovers as they negotiate the shifting terrain of the 1970s--a time when gay and lesbian politics were just emerging.     Divided into six parts, the novel enters a world marked by desire, ambition, jealousy, and love. We follow these sexually adventurous thirty-something friends as they marry, divorce, take lovers, lose love, and never stop searching for personal and artistic fulfillment.   Whether gay, straight, or bisexual, Rule's characters are as much a product of the era that defines them as of the wise and foolhardy choices they make in their own turbulent lives--choices that will have inevitable, sometimes tragic consequences.