# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When it comes to fiction, a short narrative can be found in many forms, from a slim book to just a few sentences. Short fiction forms can generally be broken down based on word count. The guidelines in this article can help you understand how short fiction is commonly defined. There are, however, no exact universal rules that everyone agrees upon, especially when it comes to flash fiction. When submitting your work for publication or contest entry, you should follow the specifications or submission guidelines. With that in mind, here's a list of short fiction forms and their definitions.

Novella

A work of fiction between 20,000 and 49,999 words is considered a novella. Once a book hits the 50,000 word mark, it is generally considered a novel. (However, a standard novel is around 80,000 words, so books between 50,000 to 79,999 words may be called short novels.) A novella is the longest of the short fiction forms, granting writers freedom for an expanded story, descriptions, and cast of characters, but still keeping the condensed intensity of a short story. Modern trends generally seem to be moving away from publishing novellas. Novellas are more commonly published as eBooks in specific genres, especially romance, sci-fi, and fantasy.

Novelette

A novelette falls in the range of 7,500 to 19,999 words. The term once implied a book that had a romantic or sentimental theme, but today a novelette can be any genre. While some writers still use the term novelette, others might prefer to simply call it a short novella or long short story. Like the novella, a novelette may be difficult to pitch to an agent, but might work better as an eBook in niche genres.

Short story

Short stories fall in the range of about 1,000 to 7,499 words. Due to its brevity, the narrative in a short story is condensed, usually only focusing on a single incident and a few characters at most. A short story is self-contained and is not part of a series. When a number of stories are written as a series it's called a story sequence. Short stories are commonly published in magazines and anthologies, or as collections by an individual author.

Flash fiction

Flash fiction is generally used as an umbrella term that refers to super short fiction of 1,000 words or less, but still provides a compelling story with a plot (beginning, middle, and end), character development, and usually a twist or surprise ending. The exact length of flash fiction isn't set, but is determined by the publisher.

Types of flash fiction

There are many new terms that further define flash fiction. For example, terms like short shorts and sudden fiction are used to describe longer forms of flash fiction that are more than 500 words, while microfiction refers to the shortest forms of flash fiction, at 300 to 400 words or less. Here are some of the types of flash fiction:

Sudden fiction/Short short stories

The terms sudden fiction and short short stories refer to longer pieces of flash fiction, around 750 to 1,000 words. However, the definition varies and may include pieces up to 2,000 words, such as in the series that helped popularize the form, Sudden Fiction and .

Postcard fiction

Postcard fiction is just what it sounds like-a story that could fit on a postcard. It's typically around 250 words, but could be as much as 500 or as few as 25. An image often accompanies the text to create the feeling of looking at a postcard, with the reader turning it over to read the inscription on the back.

Microfiction/Nanofiction

Microfiction and nanofiction describe the shortest forms of flash fiction, including stories that are 300 words or less. Microfiction includes forms such as drabble, dribble, and six-word stories.

Drabble

Drabble is a story of exactly 100 words (not including the title). Just because the form is short doesn't mean you can skimp on the basics of a good story. It should have a beginning, middle, and end, and include conflict and resolution. You can read examples of drabbles at 100WordStory.org.

Dribble/Mini-saga

When writing a drabble isn't challenging enough, you can try your hand at writing a dribble, which is a story told in exactly 50 words.

Six-word stories

Ready to boil down a story and squeeze out its essence? Try writing a six-word story. It's not easy, but it's possible to write a complete story with conflict and resolution in six words, according to flash fiction enthusiasts. The most well-know example of a six-word story, often misattributed to Ernest Hemingway, is, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." The story evokes deep emotion, causing the reader to ponder the circumstances that brought the character to post the advertisement. You can read more examples of six-word stories on Narrative Magazine's website (with a free account), which are more carefully selected, or you can browse user-submitted stories on . Some authors also write flash nonfiction, composing six-word memoirs.

Short Fiction Challenge

Now that you are more familiar with some of the forms of short fiction, why not give it a try? Flash fiction can provide a helpful change of pace and help fine tune your writing skills. The limited word count forces you to consider the weight of every action, every character, and every word. Writing good short fiction takes time and practice. Sometimes it's the shortest pieces that can take the longest to write.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Short Fiction Forms: Novella, Novelette, Short Story, and Flash Fiction Defined

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When it comes to fiction, a short narrative can be found in many forms, from a slim book to just a few sentences. Short fiction forms can generally be broken down based on word count. The guidelines in this article can help you understand how short fiction is commonly defined.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If F. Scott Fitzgerald was alive today and writing, his income would be roughly half a million dollars a year. In his prime writing days, Fitzgerald was pulling in well over ten thousand dollars a year on short stories alone. That amount of money in 1920 is equivalent to over 120 thousand dollars a year today. He made a hefty sum of money during his short-lived, brilliant, yet tumultuous career, and even though he is best known for what is often called The Great American Novel, The Great Gatsby, he was a prolific short story writer. The Saturday Evening Post paid him four grand a story during the height of his prolific career, almost exactly fifty grand a year today with inflation. To put that in perspective, each short story that he penned for the magazine earned him more money than the average American makes per year. Short stories were widely read, regarded, and there were a lot of venues that were paying good money for quality short forms of prose.

Are there any writers making fifty grand per short story, today? Absolutely not. In fact, it would be hard pressed to find many writers who specialize in short stories that make fifty grand a year, and perhaps even throughout a lifetime of short story publications. Even novelists have trouble making a decent living in a society that is dominated by visual and interactive media for means of entertainment. A short story writer today is almost like a mythical unicorn, an anomaly, an artist writing for the love of a fledgling form of writing. Short stories that are consumed today by large masses usually only appear in The New Yorker, one of the only major outlets that still publishes short stories for fairly substantial amounts of money. Getting a short story published in the most lauded magazine in America is much harder than getting a novel published. In fact, most stories that appear in the magazine are by established writers that either have a forthcoming novel or are in-between novels. Each story almost always is solicited by an agent even though The New Yorker accepts unsolicited stories. The chances of seeing your story in the pages of your weekly copy of The New Yorker is slim to none.

With print magazines constantly on the sharp decline in prevalence and fewer and fewer accepting fiction, most literary journals are found online, and even the most respected venues pay just a couple hundred dollars per story, or even nothing at all. The only other natural recourse for the modern day short story writer is to put together a collection of stories for book form. The problem with that, is if you have not been published in a magazine like The New Yorker, getting a publishing house, or even an agent to take on a collection of stories is very difficult. But getting in The New Yorker requires an agent, right? This is the vicious reality that writers of short prose live in today. Achieving publication with a collection of stories is an accomplishment in its own right, but how about sales to go along with it? As the amount of people reading has declined, the amount of individuals reading and purchasing short story collections has drastically reduced.

With that being said, writers who have been to a university have undoubtedly experienced the workshop environment, a place where novel excerpts are often frowned upon in favor of a complete story, as in a short story. There is a conundrum here as writers are often taught to start with short stories, but do not stick with them, because novels are the only form of fiction that has room to exist in today's literary landscape. What about the writers who fall in love with the short story as a medium and continue to pursue it? Do these writers matter? Despite popular opinion, short story writers are a rare breed of talent that is quite different than their fellow talented peers producing novels.

While there have been many writers in the modern era who have achieved commercial and prize accoladed success from both story collections and novels, not many have achieved widespread success exclusively from short stories. Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her debut collection Interpreter of Maladies and has since evolved into a successful novelist. David Foster Wallace was best known for a novel as physically massive as its success, Infinite Jest, but his short story collections were arguably as impressive in their own right. Alice Munro is perhaps the most successful short story writer of all time. She won the Nobel Prize in 2013 for being a "master of the contemporary short story." Steven Millhauser won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for Martin Dressler, but in the past decade he has exclusively published short story collections, including his excellent new collection, Voices in the Night. While not exactly writing in the modern era, Raymond Carver contributed to the revitalization of the short story in the 1980s. He never published a novel but is still widely read today in universities across America. His writing left a lasting impact and influenced many writers of the short form to continue to write what they loved. Without him it is unlikely that we would have even a small portion of the masters of the short story that we have today.

No more proof is needed to say that the short story is still alive and important today, when arguably the greatest writer of his generation is solely dedicated to the short story. A man who in just the second week 2013 was dubbed by The New York Times as the writer who penned "the best book you'll read this year." That book was Tenth of December written by the undeniably brilliant force that is George Saunders. Saunders has garnered fans such as Jonathan Franzen, Thomas Pynchon, and on the heels of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Wallace referred to Saunders as "the most exciting writer in America." If the merit of the short story is questioned, reading just one page of a Saunders story silences that with tremendous force. Describing a Saunders story, which usually seem laced with a bit of science fiction, post apocalyptic themes, while all the while remaining almost eerily realistic, is a difficult task. His stories shock, they make you laugh while you are simultaneously wiping away tears, and comment on society in a way that most modern writers are incapable of doing with in their own work.

What Saunders and other writers of the modern short story have done is innovate the form, bringing it to a new level that has essentially made the market harder to get into. Yes, he has set the bar very high for what can be accomplished in fifteen to twenty pages of prose. It is quite remarkable to think that within one collection, Saunders is capable of putting together roughly a dozen fully realized stories that are each some of the best fiction that is available today.

Short stories bring more pressure, because like poets, each paragraph, sentence, and word is more important than they would be inside a large novel. Short stories are precise with their delivery, they must capture the attention of the reader extraordinarily quickly, and tell a full tale from beginning to end in roughly a half hour of reading. Short stories will likely never be as widely read as novels, but they do matter to those who are paying attention. For those who attempt to become short story writers, there is a benchmark that has been set by the greats who have been able to achieve success even with the shriveled up market. In a way, the decrease of profitable venues for short story writer has made these writers enhance their craft in order to succeed and remain relevant. It really is a double edged sword, because even though there are less writers willing to write short stories because of the fear of not being able to break into the market, the ones that have taken on the challenge are producing some of the finest short stories of all time. Less creates more for short story writers. Yes, short stories matter, perhaps more than ever, as the finite supply of widely appreciated short story writers continues to dazzle us with excellent prose for as long as us readers are smart enough to pay attention.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why Short Stories Matter Now More Than Ever

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
If F. Scott Fitzgerald was alive today and writing, his income would be roughly half a million dollars a year. In his prime writing days, Fitzgerald was pulling in well over ten thousand dollars a year on short stories alone. That amount of money in 1920 is equivalent to over 120 thousand dollars a year today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How reading and writing short stories can make you a better writer.

# data[].attributes.headline
List of Short Stories - Do you recognize any?

# data[].attributes.subject
List of Short Stories - Do you recognize any?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Last year, I put together this list of the most iconic poems in the English language; it's high time to do the same for short stories. But before we go any further, you may be asking: What does "iconic" mean in this context? Can a short story really be iconic in the way of a poem, or a painting, or Elvis?

Well, who knows, but for our purposes, "iconic" means that the story has somehow wormed its way into the general cultural consciousness-a list of the best short stories in the English language would look quite different than the one below. (Also NB that in this case we're necessarily talking about the American cultural consciousness, weird and wiggly as it is.) When something is iconic, it is a highly recognizable cultural artifact that can be used as a shorthand-which often means it has been referenced in other forms of media. You know, just like Elvis. (So for those of you heading to the comments to complain that these stories are "the usual suspects"-well, exactly.) An iconic short story may be frequently anthologized, which usually means frequently read in classrooms, something that can lead to cultural ubiquity-but interestingly, the correlation isn't perfect. For instance, Joyce's "Araby" is anthologized more often, but for my money "The Dead" is more iconic. Film adaptations and catchy, reworkable titles help. But in the end, for better or for worse, you know it when you see it. Which means that, like anything else, it all depends on your point of view-icon status is (like most of the ways we evaluate art) highly subjective.

So, having acknowledged that there's no real way to make this list, but because this is what we're all here to do, here are some of the most iconic short stories for American readers in the English language-and a few more that deserve to be more iconic than they are.

Washington Irving, "Rip Van Winkle" (1819) and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820)
I agonized over whether I should pick "Rip Van Winkle" or "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" from Irving's oeuvre. Both have many, many adaptations to their name and are so ubiquitous as to have drifted into the folklore realm. The latter certainly has more memorable recent adaptations, but the former is the only one with a bridge named after it. Ah, screw it, we'll count them both.

Edgar Allan Poe, "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843)
Poe's early stream-of-consciousness horror story, unreliable narrator and heart beating under the floorboards and all, is certainly one of the most adapted-and even more often referenced-short stories in popular culture, and which may or may not be the source for all of the hundreds of stories in which a character is tormented by a sound only they can hear. (Still not quite as ubiquitous as Poe himself, though . . .)

Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853)
Once, while I was walking in Brooklyn, carrying my Bartleby tote bag, a woman in an SUV pulled over (on Atlantic Avenue, folks) to excitedly wave at me and yell "Melville! That's Melville!" Which is all you really need to know about that.

Henry James, "The Turn of the Screw" (1898)
Technically a novella, but discussed enough as a story that I'll include it here (same goes for a couple of others on this list, including "The Metamorphosis"). It has, as a work of literature, inspired a seemingly endless amount of speculation, criticism, unpacking, and stance-taking. "In comment after comment, article after article, the evidence has been sifted through and judgments delivered," Brad Leithauser wrote in The New Yorker. Fine, intelligent readers have confirmed the validity of the ghosts (Truman Capote); equally fine and intelligent readers have thunderously established the governess's madness (Edmund Wilson)." And nothing that inspires so much interpretive interest could escape the many interpretations into other media: films, episodes of television, and much other literature.

O. Henry, "The Gift of the Magi" (1905)
According to Wikipedia, there have been 17 different film adaptations of O. Henry's classic short story about a couple's thwarted Christmas; the essential format-Della sells her hair to buy Jim a watch chain; Jim sells his watch to buy Della a set of combs-has been referenced and replicated countless times beyond that. I even heard Dax Shepard refer to this story on his podcast the other day, and so I rest my case.

James Joyce, "The Dead" (1914)
The last story in Joyce's collection Dubliners and one of the best short stories ever written; just ask anyone who wanted to have read some Joyce but couldn't crack Ulysses. (Or anyone who could crack Ulysses too.) And let's not forget the John Huston movie starring Anjelica Huston as Gretta.

Richard Connell, "The Most Dangerous Game" aka "The Hounds of Zaroff" (1924)
"The most popular short story ever written in English" is obviously the one about aristocrats hunting people. Widely adapted, but one of my favorite versions is the episode of Dollhouse in which a Richard Connell (no relation except the obvious) hunts Echo with a bow.

Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery" (1948)
The short story that launched a thousand letters to The New Yorker-or if not a thousand, then at least "a torrent . . . the most mail the magazine had ever received in response to a work of fiction." Still taught widely in schools, and still chilling.

J. D. Salinger, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" (1948)
The very first story to destroy many a young mind. In a good way, obviously.
Ray Bradbury, "There Will Come Soft Rains" (1950)
Bradbury's work has thoroughly permeated pop culture; plenty of his stories are widely adapted and referenced, so I could have chosen a few others here ("The Veldt" is my personal favorite). But every year, the image of a smart house going on long after the death of its occupants becomes more chilling and relevant an image; we can't help but keep going back to it.

Daphne du Maurier, "The Birds" (1952)
I know it's really the Hitchcock film adaptation that's iconic, but you wouldn't have the Hitchcock without the du Maurier.

Elmore Leonard, "Three-Ten to Yuma" (1953)
I know, I know, it's "Fire in the Hole" that gave us Justified, and we're all so very glad. But "Three-Ten to Yuma" has more name recognition-after all, it was adapted into two separate and very good films, the former of which (1957) actually created contemporary slang: in Cuba, Americans are called yumas and the United States is La Yuma.

Philip K. Dick, "The Minority Report" (1956)
As a whole, Philip K. Dick's work has had massive influence on literature, film, pop culture, and our cultural attitudes toward technology. Most of his best-known works are novels, but when a short story gets made into a Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise film, you're basically assuring iconic status right there. (Or at least that's how it used to work...)

James Baldwin, "Sonny's Blues" (1957)
Baldwin's best known short story pops up in plenty of anthologies, and can be thanked for being the gateway drug for many budding Baldwin acolytes.

Alan Sillitoe, "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" (1959)
Not only is the story itself widely known and read-just ask Rod Blagojevich ( remember him?)-that title has been rewritten and reused thousands of times for varying ends-just ask the reporter who wrote that piece about Blagojevich. Or Adrian Tomine.

Joyce Carol Oates, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" (1966)
Another frequently anthologized and unwaveringly excellent short story; and look, it's no one's fault that Laura Dern turns everything she touches iconic.

Toni Cade Bambara, "The Lesson" (1972)
Yet another story often assigned in schools (the good ones, anyway), which hopefully means one day we'll wake up and find out that everyone has read it.

Jamaica Kincaid, "Girl" (1978)
Another staple of a writer's education, and a reader's; "are you really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won't let near the bread?" being a kind of bandied-about shibboleth.

Raymond Carver, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" (1981)
I struggled choosing a Carver story for this list-"Cathedral" is more important, and probably more read, but "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" has transcended its own form more completely, at least with its title, which has spawned a host of echoes, including Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and Nathan Englander's What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, to the point that I think it's recognizable to just about everyone. A quick Google search will reveal that the framing has been used for almost everything you can think of. There's-and I kid you not-a What We Talk About When We Talk About Books/War/Sex/God/The Tube/Games/Rape/Money/Creative Writing/Nanoclusters/Hebrew/The Weather/Defunding the Police/Free Speech/Taxes/Holes/Climate/The Moon/Waste/Cancel Culture/Impeachment/Gender/Digital Inclusions/Exacerbations of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease/COVID-19. You see what I'm getting at here.

Lorrie Moore, "How to Be an Other Woman" (1985)
A very very good short story that has given rise to so many bad ones.

Mary Gaitskill, "Secretary" (1988)
Bad Behavior is iconic as a whole, but probably the story to have most acutely permeated the wider culture is "Secretary," on account of the film adaptation starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader-despite the fact that it totally butchers the ending.

Annie Proulx, "Brokeback Mountain" (1997)
Everybody knows this story-even if they only know it from its (massively successful and influential, not to mention the true Best Picture Winner of 2006) film adaptation-and not for nothing, coming out when it did, it went a long way towards making some Americans more comfortable with homosexuality. Open the floodgates, baby.

Jhumpa Lahiri, "A Temporary Matter" (1998)
The story that made Lahiri a household name.

Alice Munro, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" (2001)
At this point, almost everyone has read at least some Alice Munro, right? This story is one of the best from one of the greats, and was also adapted into a fantastic but heartbreaking film, Away From Her.

Kristen Roupenian, "Cat Person" (2017)
Sure, it's recent, so it's not quite as ingrained as some of the others here, but it's also the story that broke the internet-and quite possibly the only New Yorker story that thousands of people have ever read.

*

Finally, as is often the case with lists that summarize the mainstream American literary canon of the last 200 years, it is impossible not to recognize that the list above is much too white and male. So for our future and continuing iconography, your friends at Literary Hub suggest reading the following stories, both new and old:

Eudora Welty, "Why I Live at the P.O." (1941)
Clarice Lispector, "The Imitation of the Rose" (1960)
Leslie Marmon Silko, "The Man to Send Rain Clouds" (1969)
Ralph Ellison, "Cadillac Flambé" (1973)
Octavia Butler, "Bloodchild" (1984)
Bharati Mukherjee, "The Management of Grief" (1988)
John Edgar Wideman, "Fever" (1990)
Sandra Cisneros, "Woman Hollering Creek" (1991)
Christine Schutt, "To Have and to Hold" (1996)
ZZ Packer, "Brownies" (2003)
Edward P. Jones, "Marie" (2004)
Karen Russell, "Haunting Olivia" (2005)
Kelly Link, "Stone Animals" (2005)
Edwidge Danticat, "Ghosts" (2008)
Yiyun Li, "A Man Like Him" (2008)
Claire Vaye Watkins, "Ghosts, Cowboys" (2009)
Ottessa Moshfegh, "Bettering Myself" (2013)
Amelia Gray, "House Heart" (2013)
Zadie Smith, "Meet the President!" (2013)
Carmen Maria Machado, "The Husband Stitch" (2014)
Diane Cook, "The Way the End of Days Should Be" (2014)
Kirstin Valdez Quade, "Five Wounds" (2015)
NoViolet Bulawayo, "Shhhh" (2015)
Mariana Enriquez, "Spiderweb" (2016)
Ken Liu, "State Change" (2016)
Helen Oyeyemi, "Sorry Doesn't Sweeten Her Tea" (2016)
Lesley Nneka Arimah, "What Is a Volcano?" (2017)
James McBride, "The Christmas Dance" (2017)
Viet Thanh Nguyen, "War Years" (2017)
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, "Friday Black" (2018). . .

Honestly, this list could go on forever, but let's stop and say: more short stories of all kinds in the hands of the general public, please!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
43 of the Most Iconic Short Stories in the English Language

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Last year, I put together this list of the most iconic poems in the English language; it's high time to do the same for short stories. But before we go any further, you may be asking: What do...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Short stories, a Children’s library, & classic literature; teachers, parents and pleasure readers love to read from our giant collection of world famous literature.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Compared to novels, short stories often get overlooked as an art form, but these singular works of fiction deserve a closer look. Short stories give readers all the compelling characters, drama, and descriptive language of great fiction but in a truly compact package.

So what is the secret behind those potent, carefully written gems? Here we tackle the definition of a short story, the key elements, examples, and some of the most common questions about short stories.

What is a short story?

A short story is a work of prose fiction that can be read in one sitting-usually between 20 minutes to an hour. There is no maximum length, but the average short story is 1,000 to 7,500 words, with some outliers reaching 10,000 or 15,000 words. At around 10 to 25 pages, that makes short stories much shorter than novels, with only a few approaching novella length. A piece of fiction shorter than 1,000 words is considered a "short short story" or "flash fiction," and anything less than 300 words is rightfully called "microfiction."

What are the key elements of a short story?

The setting of a short story is often simplified (one time and place), and one or two main characters may be introduced without full backstories. In this concise, concentrated format, every word and story detail has to work extra hard!

Short stories typically focus on a single plot instead of multiple subplots, as you might see in novels. Some stories follow a traditional narrative arc, with exposition (description) at the beginning, rising action, a climax (peak moment of conflict or action), and a resolution at the end. However, contemporary short fiction is more likely to begin in the middle of the action ( in medias res), drawing readers right into a dramatic scene.

While short stories of the past often revolved around a central theme or moral lesson, today it is common to find stories with ambiguous endings. This type of unresolved story invites open-ended readings and suggests a more complex understanding of reality and human behavior.

The short story genre is well suited to experimentation in prose writing style and form, but most short story authors still work to create a distinct mood using classic literary devices (point of view, imagery, foreshadowing, metaphor, diction/word choice, tone, and sentence structure).

What is the history of the short story?

Short-form storytelling can be traced back to ancient legends, mythology, folklore, and fables found in communities all over the world. Some of these stories existed in written form, but many were passed down through oral traditions. By the 14 th century, the most well-known stories included One Thousand and One Nights (Middle Eastern folk tales by multiple authors, later known as Arabian Nights) and Canterbury Tales (by Geoffrey Chaucer).

It wasn't until the early 19th century that short story collections by individual authors appeared more regularly in print. First, it was the publication of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, then Edgar Allen Poe's Gothic fiction, and eventually, stories by Anton Chekhov, who is often credited as a founder of the modern short story.

The popularity of short stories grew along with the surge of print magazines and journals. Newspaper and magazine editors began publishing stories as entertainment, creating a demand for short, plot-driven narratives with mass appeal. By the early 1900s, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and Harper's Magazine were paying good money for short stories that showed more literary techniques. That golden era of publishing gave rise to the short story as we know it today.

What are the different types of short stories?

Short stories come in all kinds of categories: action, adventure, biography, comedy, crime, detective, drama, dystopia, fable, fantasy, history, horror, mystery, philosophy, politics, romance, satire, science fiction, supernatural, thriller, tragedy, and Western. Here are some popular types of short stories, literary styles, and authors associated with them:

Fable: A tale that provides a moral lesson, often using animals, mythical creatures, forces of nature, or inanimate objects to come to life (Brothers Grimm, Aesop)

Flash fiction: A story between 5 to 2,000 words that lacks traditional plot structure or character development and is often characterized by a surprise or twist of fate (Lydia Davis)

Mini saga: A type of micro-fiction using exactly 50 words (!) to tell a story

Vignette: A descriptive scene or defining moment that does not contain a complete plot or narrative but reveals an important detail about a character or idea (Sandra Cisneros)

Modernism: Experimenting with narrative form, style, and chronology (inner monologues, stream of consciousness) to capture the experience of an individual (James Joyce, Virginia Woolf)

Postmodernism: Using fragmentation, paradox, or unreliable narrators to explore the relationship between the author, reader, and text (Donald Barthelme, Jorge Luis Borges)

Magical realism: Combining realistic narrative or setting with elements of surrealism, dreams, or fantasy (Gabriel García Márquez)

Minimalism: Writing characterized by brevity, straightforward language, and a lack of plot resolutions (Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel)

What are some famous short stories?

"The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843) - Edgar Allen Poe

"The Necklace" (1884) - Guy de Maupassant

"The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

"The Story of an Hour" (1894) - Kate Chopin

"Gift of the Magi" (1905) - O. Henry

"The Dead," "The Dubliners" (1914) - James Joyce

"The Garden Party" (1920) - Katherine Mansfield

"Hills Like White Elephants" (1927), "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936) - Ernest Hemingway

"The Lottery" (1948) - Shirley Jackson

"Lamb to the Slaughter" (1953) - Roald Dahl

"A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" (1955) - Gabriel García Márquez

"Sonny's Blues" (1957) - James Baldwin

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" (1953), "Everything That Rises Must Converge" (1961) - Flannery O'Connor

What are some popular short story collections?

The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien

Labyrinths - Jorge Luis Borges

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - Haruki Murakami

Nine Stories - J.D. Salinger

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver

The Stories of John Cheever - John Cheever

Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut

Complete Stories - Dorothy Parker

Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri

Suddenly a Knock at the Door - Etgar Keret

Do you have a short story collection or another book project in the works? Download our free layout software, BookWright, today and start envisioning the pages of your next book!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Compared to novels, short stories often get overlooked as an art form, but these singular works of fiction deserve a closer look. Short stories give readers all the compelling ...