Linked stories were the genre cliche of the 90s

Linked stories were truly the cliche of the 90s, after the great but brief short-story renaissance, after the great territory was opened up primarily by Raymond Carver, with his deceptive stories that looked so easy to do but were easy to do badly and nearly impossible to do well. But in Carver's wake followed thousands of would be minimalist story writers, and then as things happened many of these writers wanted to conquer the mountain and write a novel - the linked story became the easy path up the hill, and a perfect route out of grad school and into an assistant professorship - I was told once that virtually every candidate applying for an opening at RIC was allegedly working on a collection of "linked stories," and I believe very few of those were ever published. There were a few monuments of the genre - Monkeys being among the better and among the first. Edwige Danticat's "The Dew Breaker" is a later strain of the genre, from 2004 I think. Her strength is first of all that each of the stories stands very well on its own, second that they share a cultural setting and a wistful mood and that the don't feel like a cliff notes version of a novel, and third that there's variety of tone and voice from story to story. First four all concern Haitian immigrants to NYC, their said separation from the homeland, their struggle to get by in low-paying jobs and poor housing. Takes a bit before we realize that 3 of the 4 clearly are about the same family, though seen from different POVs (the 4th probably is, too, but the connection not yet clear). She plays the stories like pieces in a mosaic, willfully deciding against presenting the elements in chronological sequence - by the end we will, or should, have a more complete picture.