Impossible, necessary: Silber's half-dozen linked stories bounce between these poles.
Oates's fellow American Claire Vaye Watkins was selected for Battleborn, set in her home state of Nevada, and Canadian Tamas Dobozy for Siege 13, a series of linked stories alternating between second world war Hungary and a community of Hungarian émigrés in the contemporary west.
Maybe I could have written conventional novels from both sets of material but I'm not convinced I could have gotten the same jagged punch, the same longing and silences that rise up from the gaps in and between the linked stories.
The Chinese writer and film-director's new work of fiction, Lovers in the Age of Indifference (Chatto & Windus, £12.99), collects 17 linked stories of solitary souls in transit between places, people and passions.
In rich, loosely linked stories.
To this end, Tenth of December took years to complete, interrupted by other writing, and any planned thematic link between stories is coincidental – or, rather, unconscious.
Perhaps the fact that love is the primary linking strand between the stories in the new collection is an indication of this change, but Schlink says, "I had been thinking about these themes for a very long time, many years before I started on The Reader.
"These storybooks are important because children have an innate love for stories and stories can link not only between the world of the classroom and home but also between the classroom and beyond.
© UNICEF Malaysia/2010/Zurin Alina Gang (11) from the Temuan sub-ethnic Orang Asli group reads a story from the newly launched textbook comprising of Orang Asli folklores, "These storybooks are important because children have an innate love for stories and stories can link not only between the world of the classroom and home but also between the classroom and beyond.
At first it seems as though the spiral may be a tenuous link between stories, but when you start reading – despite the fact that all four stories are very different – it is clear that they belong together.
