Readers know when they are reading a book of short stories that is more than a miscellaneous collection yet clearly not a novel: James Joyce's Dubliners (1914) is not only different from a collection of stories such as Ian McEwan's First Love, Last Rites (1975) but also obviously different from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). The stories in books such as Dubliners both stand on their own and gather accretively to form more meaningful communities of fictions that, in turn, enlarge the meanings of each individual story. As such, the short story cycle is a middle-way genre, and its growing popularity may be accounted for in its suitability for the increasingly distracted reader's preference for brevity and the human need for continuity in aid of greater understanding. Coherence in such books of related independent stories can be achieved weakly by means of a frame narrative, a similar theme, a distinctive style, or a compositional device (such as structuring the whole on a musical or painterly subject), or achieved strongly by means of shared setting (Dubliners), focus on one character (Alice Munro's 1978 Who Do You Think You Are?), or recurrent characters and narrators (Kate Atkinson's 2002 Not the End of the World). These kinds of books the present chapter calls short story cycles, while recognizing that a number of other descriptors – series, sequence, novel in stories, composite, etc. – continue to compete for acceptance in critical-theoretical discussions of this comparatively new fictional form.

The determination of inclusion in the genre category of short story cycle depends on precision or looseness of definition. Complicating matters, many books published as novels – by publishers wary of the paying public's resistance to any title that includes ‘short story’ – are actually short story cycles (or sequences, composites, etc.). (Exceptionally, Faber and Faber advertised Kazuo Ishiguro's sombre Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009) as a ‘short story cycle’.) In addressing the question of definitional precision/imprecision, this chapter maintains a more precise understanding of what constitutes a short story cycle; nevertheless, as wide a reference as possible will be made throughout to various books of short fictions that, if not precisely story cycles, are also clearly not miscellaneous collections or novels.