Ever since Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, story cycles have been a major feature of the American literary landscape; in recent years examples by Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, Tim O' Brien, Robert Olen Butler, Jennifer Egan, and others have kept them at the forefront. Still, they are rarely taught or discussed as a distinct form. A panel of accomplished practitioners considers the advantages of this hybrid and suggests why the whole can be so much more than the sum of its parts.