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THE COMPOSITE NOVA: THE SHORT STORY CYCLE IN TRANSITION by Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris. Twayne's Studies in Literary Themes and Genres. New York: Twayne, 1995. xxxi + 192 pages. $23.95 cloth; $14.95 paper.
Dunn and Morris identify and analyze a literary genre that is familiar to most short-story readers but that very few give much thought to: collections of stories meant by their authors to be read sequentially and in their entirety, but that are more often approached randomly and piece-meal, read out of sequence, even excerpted for anthologies. For every reader of the complete Dubliners, there must be hundreds who know only "Araby" or "The Dead." The same might be said of Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Hemingway's In Our Time, and Welty's The Golden Apples, as well as many other collections of the sort analyzed by the authors. Even contemporary collections, such as Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, though often read as their authors intended, are gradually being broken up into isolated parts for anthologies.
Chapter one takes up the task of naming and defining this genre....