ABSTRACT
The book concludes with an epilogue that explores how the standalone short story in magazines and its republication in volumes have become less prevalent since the 1980s. American periodicals reimagined their formats in the wake of the World Wide Web, which in turn upended the distribution of magazine content via self-contained issues and eroded distinctions between stories and excerpts of longer fiction. The epilogue also examines contemporaneous trends in other media, namely television episodes on streaming platforms and film franchises offering sets of movies that build vast imaginary worlds, indicating that twentieth-century American linked story collections illustrate analogous narrative developments in today’s media ecology.
