Matthew James Vechinski’s Twentieth-Century American Fiction in Circulation: Short Stories Written for Magazines and Republished in Linked Story Collections (2020) begins and ends with William Faulkner. Faulkner is a fitting choice, as Vechinski seeks to understand how magazines gave rise to the linked story collections popular in the twentieth century and anticipate what might happen to linked story collections as magazines, and especially fiction in magazines, wane. Vechinski argues that scholars of the genre have not adequately attended to the stories as they appeared in magazines, instead privileging how stories appear in published collections. He engages with scholarship of short story cycles, short story sequences, and composite novels throughout—in conversation most with James Nagel and Michelle Pacht—but prefers the term “linked story collection,” because this, he suggests, is the one most popular with readers, and his interest is in readers and reception.By analyzing the “magazine as a cultural object” (19), Vechinski illuminates how the stories contributed to or reflected the ethos of the magazines in which they appeared. He does not prize the published book iteration of any story, instead embracing the tenets of genetic criticism, reception studies, and periodical studies. With Faulkner, for instance, he explains the author’s reasons for making changes to the stories published in The Saturday Evening Post that would later go into The Unvanquished. Vechinski’s work is most compelling when he unpacks the artistic sensibilities and market pressures that make some writers good fits for particular magazines, outlining trends in periodical culture from the little magazines that published Sherwood Anderson to the mass market magazines that celebrated Amy Tan.In keeping with much work on the genre, the book offers a series of case studies that trace the linked story collection across twentieth-century American literary culture. He examines linked collections from the 1910s through the 1980s, highlighting how each author developed relationships, sometimes vexed, with the magazines that published them. Chapter 2 turns to Anderson’s stories that, appearing in The Masses and The Seven Arts, espouse the liberal and socialist principles important to the two magazines, that were equally, albeit differently, committed to the production and reception of new art. Helmed at the time by Anderson’s friend Waldo Frank, The Seven Arts was especially dedicated to creating a new national art, a sentiment repeatedly expressed in Anderson’s letters, memoirs, and essays. Four of his stories would appear in their pages. Anderson’s friendship with Floyd Dell also paved the way for the publication of his stories in The Masses, and Vechinski does a lovely job tracing Dell’s shifting estimation of Anderson’s work and why the editorial practices at The Masses would favor some stories and reject others. In so doing, Vechinski shows that the editorial framing of Anderson’s stories in even the most politically progressive and artistically ambitious little magazines, themselves shaped by mission and market, determined those stories’ reception.The third chapter examines Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps, arguing that readers and critics increasingly looked to the collection as evidence of McCarthy’s life precisely when the release of her memoirs made her biography and circle more visible. McCarthy’s memoirs thus defined one strain of the collection’s reception, and Vechinski takes this convergence to suggest further that memoirs, like linked story collections, are “more tolerant of discontinuity though [their] embrace of episodic narrative” (83). Meanwhile, The Southern Review and The Partisan Review were the stories’ first outlets because, like McCarthy, each was “balancing competing agendas, trying to reconcile their critical inclinations with their aesthetic standards” (88). Yet this (im)balance between the editorial and the authorial produced, as Vechinski is careful to flesh out, a mixed reception for McCarthy’s “novel in six episodes,” sometimes in the pages of these same magazines in reviews by their editors. He also spends more time than in the previous chapters on the effect of the book, which examines the central figure Meg from different points of view and stages in her life. In previous chapters, he was more interested in the story as an autonomous object of study than its contributions to the linked collection. Here, his interest in how critics and readers received Meg as a character and as a stand in for McCarthy affords him the means to consider the book as a whole.In the fourth chapter—focusing on John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse—Vechinksi also considers the effect of the book, articulated in his claim that Lost in the Funhouse was “in fact a retrenchment, not in print or realism, but in storytelling as a mode that transcends any one medium” (119). His emphasis on the medium of storytelling leads Vechinski to suggest that the public debates on Marshall McLuhan’s idea of “the medium is the message” found their way into Barth’s book, which was subtitled Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice. That McLuhan popularized media studies in the magazines that published Barth (Esquire and The Atlantic) suggest for Vechinski that the author’s work was immersed in a debate in which “writers and artists were compelled to take a side: either endorse the familiar but banal comforts of print or embrace the vibrant new media environment.” One of Vechinski’s points is that magazines were just as compelled to take sides, as he describes the move The Atlantic made when it published “Lost in the Fun House” (the title story) quickly after its publication of Barth’s famous exegesis “The Literature of Exhaustion.”A particular high point of Vechinski’s monograph is his close reading of the 1966 publication of Barth’s “Night Sea-Journey” in Esquire, a magazine in the midst of a transition from a “men’s magazine of humor and entertainment toward significant and stylized journalism” that “never completely separated itself from the bawdier model of absurdity that preceded its maturity” (130). Vechinski’s reading of this tale—told from a spermatozoon’s point of view—pays off. The attention to where the piece was published, the revisions Barth made to it along the way (especially moving from a plural first-person narrator to the singular), and its relation to the finished volume make this a rewarding close reading. The larger framing about Esquire’s mission and audience helps us understand why they picked up this particular short story.The final chapter turns to the efforts Seventeen and Ladies’ Home Journal made to edit and contextualize two of Amy Tan’s short stories for their readers. Focusing on the sections the two mass market magazines deleted for the stories’ appearance Vechinski calls attention to their resulting cultivation of specific visions of womanhood and suggests that that cultivation is a form of editorial reception. “The Rules of the Game” had been previously published in its entirety as “Endgame” by a smaller magazine out of San Francisco when Seventeen picked it up; Vechinski argues that the sections deleted, and the title change, signal Seventeen’s attempt to affirm and celebrate individuality and maturation. Therefore, the sections that show ambiguity or loss were cut. In the case of the title story, “The Joy Luck Club,” appearing in Ladies’ Home Journal, the most interesting insight is that it appeared at all, at a time when the magazine, once the home of much fiction, dedicated less than 1% of its pages to fiction. The cuts made to this story render it more akin to creative nonfiction in that they removed the more clearly fictional elements, and as Vechinski argues, might have led an LHJ reader (to the editors’ pleasure) to read the story as memoir, a nice nod back to the McCarthy chapter. In both cases, editorial cuts to align the stories more closely with the audiences’ anticipated reception: for Seventeen, young women who were meant to be looking forward to growing up and promised self-actualization, and for LHJ, adult women readers who were curious to know more about Asian American experience in settings and contexts familiar to domestic life. The stories, as they appeared in the magazines and not the books, reflected the intended audiences of each publication.In the epilogue, Vechinski returns to Faulkner; this time, however, he makes the case that Faulkner, like Balzac, provides a model for a dominant storytelling mode today: the paracosm. He contends that Faulkner’s world building is akin to the work that goes on in popular culture, including the Avengers, Star Wars, and beyond. Bayard Sartoris is a prototype for the kinds of characters who might die in one movie only to appear in the prequel that comes out two years later. The epilogue is evocative and suggestive rather than exhaustive, and I found it a lovely endnote and nod to the future of the linked story collection.