My name is Christopher Marcus and I’m the creator of the two linked short story projects – linkedshortstories.com and shortstorycycles.com.
If you have arrived here of your own free will you probably have at least some idea of what a linked short story collection / short story cycle is, but just in case allow me to quote Forrest Ingram, who was the first modern writer to name and analyze the form:
“a short story cycle [is] a book of short stories so linked to each other by their author that the reader’s successive experience on various levels of the pattern of the whole significantly modifies his experience of each of its component parts”
– Ingram, Forrest L. Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century. The Hague: Mouton, 1971, p. 19.
I have read lots of definitions of short story cycles and to be honest this one – the very first – is still as good as it gets for me.
In the last 10 years, I have written mostly contemporary linked short stories and gotten ever more fascinated by the form.
The page you see before you is an overview of my projects in this regard!
First up is linkedshortstories.com which lists a selection of linked short story collections!
I also have an encyclopedic site, where I have listed a selection of academic materials about short story cycles. This is where you will find analyses of the form.
If you have any recommendations for linked short stories (or academic work about them) which I should index – feel free to shoot me an email.
I do write my own collections of linked short stories that tell the story of a family through three generations – from 1968 to 2068. You can find these stories on dependingonthemorningsun.com.
All of the sites above are labors of love and will no longer be updated unless I receive submissions for them (see above).
Chris
chris AT shadeofthemorningsun DOT com