Its status as a genre unto itself often disputed, the short story sequence is a hybrid organism which defies the stereotypes imputed to more conventionally recognized forms of narrative, such as the short story and the novel. By resisting precise definition, it lays down a critical challenge to decode its perplexing formal ambiguities. Modern American Short Story Sequences meets this challenge by suggesting an entirely new means of inquiry. Gathering together eleven new full-length essays, this book is an invitation to reconsider the short story sequence as a tradition proper, one formed in the twentieth-century crucible of American literature and one whose very inscrutability continues to provoke intense debate in the realm of fiction studies.

Introduction J. Gerald Kennedy; 1. Henry James's Incipient Poetics of the Short Story Sequence: The Finer Grain (1910) Richard A. Hocks; 2. Toomer's Cane as narrative sequence Linda Wagner-Martin; 3. Hemingway's In Our Time: the biography of a book Michael Reynolds; 4. Wright writing reading: narrative strategies in Uncle Tom's Children John Lowe; 5. The African-American voice in Faulkner's Go Down Moses John Carlos Rowe; 6. Meditations on nonpresence: re-visioning the short story in Eudora Welty's The Wide Net Susan V. Donaldson; 7. Nine Stories: J. D. Salinger's linked mysteries Ruth Prigozy; 8. Cheever's Shady Hill: a suburban sequence Scott Donaldson; 9. John Updike's Olinger Stories: new light among the shadows Robert M. Luscher; 10. Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine: narrative communities and the short story sequence Hertha D. Wong; 11. From Anderson's Winesburg to Carver's Cathedral: the short story sequence and the semblance of community J. Gerald Kennedy.