Excerpt: The short story cycle, often relegated to the margin of literary studies, offers a pertinent example of a nomadic genre. Because it resists definition, it inhabits a liminal space straddling the short story and the novel. The fixed centrality of the novel, as a recognized and well-established genre, is upset by texts trespassing borders […]
Experimentalism and Innovation in the Kurdish Short Story in Bahdinan Since 1991
Abstract Within the framework of experimentation and innovation in the short story, this study examines the most significant creative aspects of the Kurdish short story written in Kurmanji dialect in Bahdinan in Iraqi Kurdistan. A specific period was covered, starting in 1991, as this represented the genesis of a new era in Kurdish literature. Despite […]
Inheritance: A linked short story collection
Inheritance is a linked short story collection of eight fictional narratives of lives impacted by interpersonal violence and abuse, along with the myriad of complexities we navigate through the course of our daily lives. Fictional stories often portray those who have experienced gendered violence as victims or as permanently harmed. Constructing victimized people as silenced, […]
Magic Realism at the Service of Ethnicity: Darrell Kastin’s Azorean Honeymoon in The Conjurer & Other Azorean Tales
This essay attempts to contribute to the ongoing critical discussion on theshort story-cycle and its tradition within the framework of emergent contemporary American literatures, more specifically American writings with a Portuguese ethnic resonance. The collection of stories which will be the basis for discussion in the ensuing pages is Darrell Kastin’s The Conjurer & Other […]
Circling the end of the line in Vimala Devi’s Monção: glints of significance across Vimala Devi’s short story cycle
In this article I analyse Vimala Devi’s Monção (1963) as a short-story cycle, a genre that differs as much from the traditional novel as from non-integrated collections of short narratives in its “tension between variety and unity, separateness and interconnectedness, fragmentation and continuity, openness and closure” (Lundén 12). It is this generic quality I argue, […]
North of Vinland
What happens when the romantic and imperialistic stories of Canada’s north become clearly outmoded and unsustainable? In North of Vinland, my collection of linked short stories and essays, I explore the transition from an older narrative mode to a newer, hybrid mode responsive to the demands of the 21st century. In the short stories, I […]
Inclusive Memory: The Power of Collective Remembering in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place
This essay considers how collective memory works to develop and sustain a group identity in Gloria Naylor’s 1980 novel, The Women of Brewster Place. Using post-structural theorist Bronwyn Davies’s collective biography project as a model through which to understand Naylor’s work, it becomes clear how collective remembering in the novel prompts the women characters to […]
David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide: Dismantling the Trauma Paradigm
This article argues that David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide (2008) offers us a culturally significant exploration of hegemonic theories around how we understand, or are said to understand, the temporality of trauma, its effect upon identity via its effect upon memory, and its representation in narrative. Moreover, the specific structure of Vann’s text as a short […]
Reader participation in the composite novel
A comparative analysis of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Pam Houston’s Waltzing the Cat. From: Vermillion, M. K. (2003). Reader participation in the composite novel: Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Pam Houston’s Waltzing the Cat (Texas Tech University). Link: https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/handle/2346/17119 The Things They Carried entry at LinkedShortStories.com Note: This thesis contains […]
Yearning, Frustration, and Fulfillment: The Return Story in Olive Kitteridge and Kissing in Manhattan
First paragraphs: The use of absence in the short story cycle is an overlooked but vital element of the genre.1 It contributes to the way that cycles can manipulate the focus in their stories, using developed patterns of absence to influence the reader’s response. The technique of the return story is identified by Gerald Lynch […]