First paragraph: The first decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed the publication of several works of fiction that, though marketed as novels, wear that label rather uneasily. These works are highly fragmented texts, made up of separate textual units – short stories, novellas, sketches, textual fragments, or a mixture of these – which become […]
Linked Stories, Connected Lives: The Lucky Ones as Short Story Cycle
This essay considers the thematic repercussions of the peculiar narrative and generic structure of The Lucky Ones as a collection of linked short stories. The form of the short story cycle allows Cusk to stage a variety of perspectives on parenthood and family life within one book. Moreover, the tension between unity and fragmentation, which is characteristic […]
Cycles, Recueils, Macrotexts. The Short Story Collection in a Comparative Perspective
This issue aims to map and critically assess different theoretical approaches to the interlinking of short stories in a collection. Within the Anglo-American critical tradition, the dominant critical frame is that of the short story cycle, while in the Francophone tradition, the short story cycle has been linked to a broader variety of genres and […]