Short story
brief work of literature, usually written in narrative prose
A short story is a piece of prose fiction. It can typically be read in a single sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood.
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Quotes
edit- Anybody can write a short story—a bad one, I mean—who has industry and paper and time enough; but not everyone may hope to write even a bad novel. It is the length that kills.
- Stevenson, Robert Louis (1894). "Treasure Island". In Besant, Walter; et al. My First Book. London: Chatto & Windus.
- Our modern attraction to short stories is not an accident of form; it is the sign of a real sense of fleetingness and fragility; it means that existence is only an impression, and, perhaps, only an illusion. A short story of to-day has the air of a dream; it has the irrevocable beauty of a falsehood; we get a glimpse of grey streets of London or red plains of India, as in an opium vision; we see people,—arresting people, with fiery and appealing faces. But when the story is ended, the people are ended. We have no instinct of anything ultimate and enduring behind the episodes. The moderns, in a word, describe life in short stories because they are possessed with the sentiment that life itself is an uncommonly short story, and perhaps not a true one.
- Chesterton, G. K. (1906). "Chapter IV: The Pickwick Papers". Charles Dickens. New York: Dodd Mead.
- ... there are more goodish novels than there are good short stories, and I think a short story has to be very good to have any effect. And I think that you could probably... 100 short stories would be all there are, almost. Really great short stories. That’s probably not true, but there are so few really great short stories. A novel is a big bulky thing, you know. I suppose, well, with Kipling’s stories they’ve had a great effect, and O. Henry’s stories have. Shall we say that I think a great short story teller should have as much effect as a great novelist. I think that’s the answer, isn’t it, but there are so few. They really are. Maugham and O. Henry, Kipling, Maupassant. They’re not... Bret Harte’s done a few, but there’re not a great many.
- Alec Waugh, A Novelist on Novels. PSU Library Special Collections and University Archives Oregon Public Speakers Collection (March 7, 1960 Portland State College).
