The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of the Genre

James Nagel offers the first systematic history and definition of the short story cycle genre as exemplified in contemporary American fiction, bringing attention to the format’s wide appeal among various ethnic groups. He examines in detail eight recent manifestations of the story cycle, all praised by critics while uniformly misidentified as novels: Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich; Annie John, by Jamaica Kincaid; Monkeys, by Susan Minot; The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros; The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien; How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, by Julia Alvarez; The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan; and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, by Robert Olen Butler. Nagel proposes that the short-story cycle, with its concentric as opposed to linear plot development possibilities, lends itself particularly well to exploring themes of ethnic assimilation, which mirror some of the major issues facing American society t