Kenneth Ramchand begins his essay ‘The West Indian Short Story’ (1997) with the provocative statement: ‘There are no West Indian novelists, only short story writers in disguise; no West Indian novels, only fabrications taking their shape and structure from the transfigurated short stories they contain’. While I would not go so far as to claim, as Ramchand does, that all Caribbean fiction writers are short story writers, this book nevertheless presents the phenomenon of interconnected stories as a significant feature of contemporary Anglophone Caribbean literary cultures. The short story played a crucial role in the emergence of an Anglophone Caribbean literary tradition. In the first half of the twentieth century, local newspapers and small magazines provided an outlet for the publication of short fiction and poetry. In a region which lacked the facilities and distribution channels necessary for the publication of longer works, the short story flourished, providing an initial platform for some of the Caribbean's best-known literary writers. Building on Ramchand’s statement, which relates to novels of the 1950s and 60s, this book argues for the continuing prevalence of the short story form within late twentieth and early twenty-first century Anglophone Caribbean writing, despite the fact that the short story's mode and context of publication have changed. Having made their name and attracted the attention of publishers outside the Caribbean region, writers such as Olive Senior and Alecia McKenzie have chosen to produce short story collections rather than writing novels. Others, such as Lawrence Scott and Dionne Brand, have produced texts made up of interconnected stories, marketed as novels. The tendency since the 1980s for short stories to be published within single-author collections or cycles rather than as stand-alone items invites us to look beyond the narrative structure of individual stories and pay attention to resonances between stories, whether these are overt or implicit, deliberate or accidental.

In his Tropical Night sequence, displayed as part of the Tate Liverpool Afro Modern exhibition in 2010, Trinidadian artist Christopher Cozier translates the form of interconnected stories into a series of separate images, each with its own individual title, positioned above, below and alongside each other, their proximity inviting viewers to make connections between them.