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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.
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short story, brief fictional prose narrative that is shorter than a novel and that usually deals with only a few characters.
The short story is usually concerned with a single effect conveyed in only one or a few significant episodes or scenes. The form encourages economy of setting, concise narrative, and the omission of a complex plot; character is disclosed in action and dramatic encounter but is seldom fully developed. Despite its relatively limited scope, though, a short story is often judged by its ability to provide a “complete” or satisfying treatment of its characters and subject.
As a genre, the short story received relatively little critical attention through the middle of the 20th century, and the most valuable studies of the form were often limited by region or era. In his The Lonely Voice (1963), the Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor attempted to account for the genre by suggesting that stories are a means for “submerged population groups” to address a dominating community. Most other theoretical discussions, however, were predicated in one way or another on Edgar Allan Poe’s thesis that stories must have a compact unified effect.
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By far the majority of criticism on the short story focused on techniques of writing. Many, and often the best of the technical works, advise the young reader—alerting the reader to the variety of devices and tactics employed by the skilled writer. On the other hand, many of these works are no more than treatises on “how to write stories” for the young writer rather than serious critical material.
The prevalence in the 19th century of two words, “sketch” and “tale,” affords one way of looking at the genre. In the United States alone there were virtually hundreds of books claiming to be collections of sketches (Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book, William Dean Howells’s Suburban Sketches) or collections of tales (Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Herman Melville’s The Piazza Tales). These two terms establish the polarities of the milieu out of which the modern short story grew.
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- “Speaking in Tongues” by ZZ Packer. Tia, disillusioned with her strict Pentecostal upbringing in a sleepy Southern town, escapes her great-aunt’s clutches to find her mother in Atlanta.
- “Viewfinder” by Raymond Carver. “Viewfinder” has a simple premise: a traveling photographer takes a photo of the narrator’s house, sells it to him on his doorstep, and is invited in for coffee.
- “We Love You Crispina” by Jenny Zhang. Zhang’s 2017 short story collection Sour Heart chronicles the rough-and-tumble lives of recently immigrated Chinese-American living in downtown Manhattan.
- “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor. This short story sent shock waves through the American literary establishment when it was first published in 1953.
- The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde. The Happy Prince is one of the best stories written in English Literature written by Oscar Wilde. The story shows how the elites of that kingdom neglect the poor.
- The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In the short story The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte sheds light on the difficulties faced by the narrator of the story, due to depression after childbirth.
- The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe. Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is another wonderful example of a short horror story. In the story, the anonymous narrator tells about the murder of an old man that he has committed in cold blood because he had ‘vulture eyes’.
- The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin. This story is an extraordinary piece of its time. Louise Mallard, probably oppressed by her husband, is relieved when she sees the prospects of freedom after the death of her husband.
Short stories make use of plot, resonance and other dynamic components as in a novel, but typically to a lesser degree. While the short story is largely distinct from the novel or novella/short novel, authors generally draw from a common pool of literary techniques. [citation needed]
The short story genre, or short story form, encompasses fully developed fictional stories that are typically between 1,000 and 20,000 words. Short stories enjoyed great cultural popularity in recent modern history, a phenomenon that was aided by technical innovation.
Nov 6, 2023 · A short story is a brief work of fiction that typically focuses on a single character or a small group of characters, exploring a particular theme or concept. Unlike a novel, which can span hundreds or even thousands of pages, a short story usually has a limited number of words, making it more concise and often easier to read and understand.
