How to Order a Story Collection

Laura van den Berg offers some good advice about how to think about ordering a short story collection in this Glimmer Train essay:

With so much thematic overlap, there can be a very fine line between "coherence" and "redundancy," and so I tried to make sure each story was turning over a slightly different kind of stone. I made lists of all the first and last lines to help determine the arrangement.  

Read on: http://www.glimmertrain.com/b82berg.html