1In this insightful study, Jennifer Smith moves from a lucid reflection on the controversial debate over the origins, characteristics and literary labels attributed to the short story cycle as a genre to explore how American cycles have contributed to articulating the problematic notion of modern subjectivity from the nineteenth century to contemporary times, in periods of cultural and ideological change. She examines texts by authors from different historical and ethnic backgrounds to illustrate how this genre, with its characteristic literary form and its recurring narrative motifs, challenges the notion of identity as a fixed, unitary entity shaped by linear narrative practices and framed in well-defined structures of time and space. Her extensive analysis aims to broaden the scope of the genre by including volumes usually considered under different literary labels. It also stresses the connections between a heterogeneous corpus of texts, ranging from Homer’s Odyssey and Boccaccio’s Decameron to the contemporary flash fiction of Mario Alberto Zambrano and Justin Torres. Her study is not organized chronologically; it constantly moves backward and forward in time as Smith compares different works. This could upset readers accustomed to a traditional, systematic treatment of literary texts, but it also evokes the use of non-linear, fragmented time in many short story cycles. Rather than devoting each chapter to the detailed analysis of the plot and narrative structure of a single literary work, as some other critical texts do, The American Short Story Cycle groups together several short story cycles in each section, following a thematic approach: first, it locates the genre against a literary and historical backdrop, then it explores the treatment of space, time, family connections and identity in different sets of narratives.

2The first section, “Locating the Short Story Cycle,” traces the development of the nineteenth-century American short story cycle, with its emphasis on narratives linked by a common setting, from the intersection between the regionalist tradition of village sketchbooks, the romanticist fascination with the natural world and the modernist concern for the alienation of the individual in industrialised societies. Moreover, it illustrates how the convergence of these literary traditions shapes the motifs of dislocation, incommunicability and “critical nostalgia” in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), compared to earlier nineteenth-century American cycles. In the subsequent analysis of Anderson’s literary legacy in contemporary times, the section “The Persistence of Place” investigates the significance of place-centred cycles, including Russell Banks’s Trailerpark (1981), Cathy Day’s The Circus in Winter (2004) and Rebecca Barry’s Later, at the Bar (2007). Here, the author demonstrates how, by setting the stories in limited, marginalised spaces, these cycles stress the paradoxical interconnection between community and individual alienation.

3After exploring the function of place and limited locality in American short story cycles, Smith’s study shifts to the treatment of time, with a comparative analysis of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1984). Interestingly, she argues that these literary works both depict temporality as an intersection of transitional cultural constructions akin to Mary Louise Pratt’s idea of the “contact zone” and Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of a “Borderland.” She thus illustrates how these cycles represent (the Martians’ and the Chippewas’) alternative conceptions of temporality that contrast with the standardized capitalist division of time, thus conveying the viewpoints of (extra-terrestrial and Native American) subjectivities resisting the traditional Western notion of identity.

4The next sections focus on the interconnection of issues related to ethnic identity, gender, belonging and kinship in different short story cycles. In her analysis of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989), Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth (2008), constructed around the vicissitudes of families from ethnic backgrounds, Smith emphasises how these narratives challenge the dominant assumption that family is a natural, universal and consistent form of kinship. She contends that, by showing the historical and cultural forces shaping family, these cycles question its traditional role and envision new modes of connection, with complex kinship structures stemming from shared formative experiences rather than consanguinity. Expanding on the theme of the intertwined representations of kinship, ethnic identity and temporality in American short story cycles, the author goes on to examine how William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942) and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) resist and complicate stable conceptions of being as a unitary entity defined by race, family and time. In doing so, she stresses the continuity of the short story cycle as a genre, the evolution of specific motifs recurring in works from different periods, and the contemporary intersections between the modernist literary legacy and the new narratives conveyed by visual media and music.

5Finally, The American Short Story Cycle envisions new directions in the genre and identifies flash fiction as an emerging literary form that could be paralleled to the short story cycle and could affect its evolution across the twenty-first century. Therefore, Smith contends that Mario Alberto Zambrano’s Lotería (2013) and Justin Torres’s We the Animals (2011), labelled “novellas-in-flash” by other critics, can be appropriately called “flash cycles” due to their narrative structure, their resistance to singularity and conclusion, and their treatment of issues of ethnic belonging, familial structures, place and time. Although it lacks a unifying, encompassing conclusion (which could in fact be an authorial stratagem to mirror the open-endedness of the genre), The American Short Story Cycle is a valuable study that draws insightful connections between different cycles with its thematic approach, covering issues that have not been thoroughly addressed by earlier scholarship and seeking to identify new trends.