The inclination to combine individual stories into larger wholes goes way back into oral tradition. In the literary world this kind of story linkage is known as a short story cycle, or sequence (various other names exist but these have caught on). It is not a collection of isolated stories but collections of stories with common themes, imagery, and tone and often with common setting and characters. The boundaries distinguishing a collection of short stories from a cycle are often blurry. In his studies, Forrest L. Ingram has defined a cycl ....