short story

A short story is a form of short fictional narrative prose. Short stories tend to be more concise and to the point than longer works of fiction, such as novellas (in the modern sense of this term) and novels. Because of their brevity, successful short stories rely on literary devices such as character, plot, theme, language, and insight to a greater extent than long form fiction.

Famous and/or influential modern English-language short stories include "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" by Ernest Hemingway, "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe, "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Bartleby the Scrivener" by Herman Melville, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce, "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dead" by James Joyce, "To Build A Fire" by Jack London, "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner, and "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx.

Short stories have their origins in the prose anecdote, a swiftly-sketched situation that comes rapidly to its point, with parallels in oral story-telling traditions. With the rise of the comparatively realistic novel, the short story evolved as a miniature, with some of its first perfectly independent examples in the tales of E.T.A. Hoffman and Edgar Allan Poe.