This Is Not About Us By Allegra Goodman The Dial Press, 336 pp. If novels, as Henry James so memorably put it, are “loose, baggy monsters” while the short story is “a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form,” what do you call a collection of short fictions that revolve around the same group of characters, set in the same time and place? Linked stories? A story cycle or sequence? A novel-in-stories?