The form designed to do its work in twenty pages. Two centuries of compression — Poe to Saunders, Maupassant to Lispector, Chekhov to Munro.
A short story is the form a writer uses when a single effect is the whole point. It does in twenty pages what a novel needs three hundred for and what a poem refuses to do at all.
Edgar Allan Poe in 1842 set out the principle: a short story should be readable in "a single sitting"
and should aim at "a certain unique or single effect."
Every detail should serve that effect; every detail that does not should be cut. It is a tighter contract with the reader than the novel makes.
The form has produced a separate canon from the novel. Some writers (Borges, Carver, Munro, Saunders) are essentially story writers who occasionally wrote longer. Some major novelists (Tolstoy, Chekhov, Joyce, Hemingway, García Márquez) wrote stories that survive better than parts of their novels do. The history of the form is its own thing.
Long fictional prose existed for centuries before what we now call the short story. Boccaccio's Decameron (c. 1353) — a hundred tales told over ten days by ten Florentines fleeing the Black Death. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (c. 1387, in verse but in story-collection form). One Thousand and One Nights in its various medieval Arabic recensions. The Chinese Liaozhai zhiyi ("Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio") of Pu Songling (1740).
What these have that the modern story does not: the framing device, the moral, the explicit storyteller. What they lack: the modern story's interest in a single moment of psychological or moral revelation, its compression to a single effect, its refusal of the explicit moral.
The transition begins in the 18th century with Voltaire's contes philosophiques — Candide (1759), Zadig, Micromégas. Short, satirical, with a single argumentative point. They are not yet stories in the modern sense; they are arguments dressed as stories.
The American short story begins, more or less, with Edgar Allan Poe. His major stories were published 1838–46: The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), The Tell-Tale Heart (1843), The Pit and the Pendulum (1842), The Cask of Amontillado (1846), The Black Cat (1843). Plus, in 1841, The Murders in the Rue Morgue — the first detective story.
Poe's 1842 review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales set out the theory: a short story is a calculated machine for a single effect. "A skilful artist has constructed a tale. He has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents — he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect."
The principle has been challenged but never abandoned. Almost every major short-story writer since has, implicitly or explicitly, worked from it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) — the other origin of the American short story. Where Poe is a craftsman of effect, Hawthorne is a moralist of New England Puritanism. Young Goodman Brown (1835) — the most-anthologised story of the period — sends a Puritan into the forest one night and returns him having seen, or perhaps imagined, his entire community at a witches' sabbath.
Hawthorne's mode is allegorical: a story is not just a story but a working diagram of a moral problem. He gave the American short story its first quality of seriousness. Henry James's biography of Hawthorne (1879) made the case that Hawthorne, working with very little — Puritan New England, no court, no army, no national capital — managed the literary art the new country had not previously produced.
The French inheritor and perfecter of the form. Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) wrote roughly three hundred stories in a working life of barely twelve years. He died at 42, syphilitic, in a Paris asylum. The major stories — Boule de Suif (1880), The Necklace (1884), The Horla (1887) — are studied today as the first fully achieved modern short stories.
Where Poe gets a single effect through atmosphere, Maupassant gets one through structure. The Necklace: a clerk's wife borrows a friend's necklace, loses it, replaces it with a real one bought on credit, spends ten years paying the debt off in poverty, then learns the original was paste. The story is twelve pages long; the irony lands in the last sentence; nothing is wasted.
Flaubert was Maupassant's mentor. "Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is one word to express it, one verb to give it movement, one adjective to qualify it. You must seek that word, that verb, that adjective, until you find them, and never be content with an approximation."
"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."— attributed to Chekhov, in many forms
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) — physician, Russian, dead of tuberculosis at 44 — turned the short story away from the structured punch of Maupassant and toward something quieter and harder. A Chekhov story will end without resolving; a marriage will not be saved; an opportunity will not be taken; the characters will return to their lives slightly changed, or not changed.
The major stories: The Lady with the Dog (1899), Ward No. 6 (1892), Gusev (1890), The Bishop (1902), The Bet. Chekhov's late style influenced Joyce, Mansfield, Hemingway, Carver, Munro, William Trevor, Maeve Brennan, William Maxwell.
The Constance Garnett translations are the historical baseline; the more recent Pevear & Volokhonsky selections (2000, 2010) and Rosamund Bartlett's 2004 selection are now standard.
James Joyce's Dubliners (1914) — fifteen stories about Dublin life, arranged in a loose progression from childhood to public life. The famous final story, The Dead, is one of the few short stories generally agreed to be a permanent classic of the language.
Joyce's contribution to the form was the epiphany — a moment of sudden, ordinary illumination in which a character (or the reader, sometimes more than the character) understands something. The Dead ends with snow falling all over Ireland and the protagonist Gabriel Conroy realising he has never loved his wife as her dead first sweetheart loved her. Nothing in the story has prepared this revelation; everything in the story has prepared it.
The technique was widely imitated. By the 1950s, the well-made New Yorker story — middle-class crisis, ordinary detail, a closing ambiguous moment of awareness — was Joyce's Dubliners attenuated.
Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923, dead of tuberculosis at 34, like Chekhov) — New Zealand-born, London-based, a friend and rival of Virginia Woolf. The Garden Party (1922), Bliss (1918), Prelude (1918), The Daughters of the Late Colonel. Mansfield brought Chekhov's late mode into English. Her story endings — partial, glancing, refusing closure — are the model that British and Commonwealth writers have used since.
Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) — Anglo-Irish, prolific. The Demon Lover (1945) — wartime ghost story; The Happy Autumn Fields; Mysterious Kôr. D. H. Lawrence's stories — The Rocking-Horse Winner, The Prussian Officer, Odour of Chrysanthemums — are some of his best work, less ranted than the novels.
Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time (1925) and the stories collected in The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1938) are the central American short fiction of the early 20th century. Major stories: Hills Like White Elephants (1927), A Clean, Well-Lighted Place (1933), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936), The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (1936), Big Two-Hearted River (1925).
Hemingway's theory: the iceberg. "If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them."
What is on the page is one-eighth; the rest is the underwater mass the reader senses.
Hills Like White Elephants — six pages, two characters at a Spanish train-station bar, an unspoken conversation about an abortion. The word "abortion" never appears. The story is about it entirely.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) wrote almost no novels. His major form was the short story or, more precisely, the philosophical fiction: a fable, an essay, a literary review of an invented book, a labyrinth, a library, a coin, an encyclopaedia entry. The major collections: Ficciones (1944), El Aleph (1949), Labyrinths (English selection, 1962).
Key stories: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940), The Library of Babel (1941), The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), Funes the Memorious (1942), Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939), The Aleph (1945). Each is roughly ten pages. Each contains an entire metaphysics.
Borges wrote that the novel was "a wasteful, an exhausted form."
A short story could do everything a novel did, faster. The argument has not won, but it produced, in his case, twenty stories that no novelist of the 20th century has equalled.
Julio Cortázar (1914–1984), Argentine, lived most of his adult life in Paris. The novel Hopscotch (1963) is the most famous, but the stories are at least as good. Bestiary (1951), Final del juego (1956), Las armas secretas (1959). Major individual stories: House Taken Over, Continuity of Parks, Axolotl, Letter to a Young Lady in Paris, Blow-Up (1959; Antonioni filmed a transformation of it in 1966).
The Cortázar mode: a domestic situation that turns gradually surreal and unreasonable, narrated in the same flat tone throughout. House Taken Over — two adult siblings live in a large house; rooms gradually become "taken" by something they do not see and do not name; eventually they are forced out. The story is six pages and has been read for seventy years as a parable of every kind of dispossession.
Mary Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964), Georgia, dead of lupus at 39. Two short novels and 32 stories collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (posth. 1965). Catholic, Southern Gothic, fierce.
O'Connor's stories are concerned with grace — the moment a sinner is, often violently, given a chance at redemption. A Good Man Is Hard to Find: a vacationing family is shot one by one in a Georgia ditch by an escaped convict; in the last seconds the grandmother extends to him a moment of unforced compassion. Revelation, Everything That Rises Must Converge, Greenleaf, Parker's Back. Each ends in the kind of violence American Protestant writers had not previously been willing to use to make a point about salvation.
The Complete Stories won the National Book Award in 1972, and again in 2009 when readers voted it the best winner of the prize's history.
John Cheever (1912–1982) — suburban tragedy as a literary subject. The Swimmer (1964) is his single most-anthologised story: a man crosses a New York suburb by swimming the pools of every house between his work and home, and the journey condenses an entire decade of his life. The Country Husband, Goodbye, My Brother, The Enormous Radio. The Stories of John Cheever (1978) won the Pulitzer.
John Updike's short fiction is sometimes underrated next to his novels. Pigeon Feathers (1962), The Music School (1966), Problems (1979). A&P (1961) is his most-taught story.
Both writers worked the same milieu — middle-class American Northeast, marriages, infidelities, the ironies of comfort — but Cheever at his best had a Chekhovian melancholy that Updike's polish never quite touched.
Raymond Carver's three major collections — Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976), What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), Cathedral (1983) — defined American short fiction for a decade. Stripped sentences, working-class characters, marriages held together or coming apart, alcoholism. The 1981 collection was so heavily edited by Carver's editor Gordon Lish that some critics, after the publication of the original manuscripts (as Beginners, 2009), have argued that the radical minimalism is at least partly Lish's.
Either way, the influence was vast. The Carver style — short, declarative, refusal of psychological commentary, the iceberg of significance below — became the default mode of MFA-era American short fiction in the 1980s and 90s.
Adjacent: Tobias Wolff's In the Garden of the North American Martyrs; Ann Beattie's Distortions; Mary Robison; Bobbie Ann Mason.
Alice Munro (1931–2024), Canadian, won the Nobel in 2013 for a body of work consisting almost entirely of short stories. Her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, appeared in 1968; her last, Dear Life, in 2012. Fourteen books, perhaps 150 stories.
Munro's stories are unusually long for the form — often 40–60 pages — and unusually patient with time. A typical Munro story will move across decades, fold a character's whole life into the framing of a single recent event, and return at the end with the cumulative weight of the whole. The Lives of Girls and Women (1971), The Beggar Maid (1978), The Progress of Love (1986), Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) are the strongest collections.
Cynthia Ozick called her "our Chekhov."
The comparison is exact. The patience, the refusal to score easy moral points, the quiet revelations that ambush the reader on rereading.
George Saunders's CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), Pastoralia (2000), Tenth of December (2013). Theme-park dystopia, corporate-speak as voice, deep moral seriousness under the comic surface. The 2017 Booker for the novel Lincoln in the Bardo recognised what story readers had known for two decades.
Lorrie Moore's Birds of America (1998) — funny in a way American short fiction had largely forgotten how to be, and devastating with it. Joy Williams's The Visiting Privilege (2015) collects 46 stories from a five-decade career; the late stories are some of the strangest American fiction of the period.
Adjacent contemporary writers: Deborah Eisenberg, Edward P. Jones, ZZ Packer, Bryan Washington, Carmen Maria Machado, Ling Ma, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Bryan Washington.
García Márquez's stories — Big Mama's Funeral, Innocent Eréndira. Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star (novella) and Family Ties. Samanta Schweblin's Mouthful of Birds (2009). Mariana Enriquez's Things We Lost in the Fire (2009) and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed.
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's stories. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's Rashōmon and In a Grove (1922) — Kurosawa's Rashomon conflates them. Banana Yoshimoto. Yoko Ogawa's Revenge (1998). Murakami's The Elephant Vanishes (1993). Bora Chung's Cursed Bunny (2017, English 2021).
Saadat Hasan Manto's Partition stories — fierce, brief, the most concentrated short fiction the subcontinent has produced. Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (1999, Pulitzer). Amit Chaudhuri; Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (2009).
The novella — between roughly 20,000 and 50,000 words — is the form that does not have a single agreed name in English (some publishers call them "long stories"; some call them "short novels"). The form has produced an unreasonable number of permanent classics.
Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) and Benito Cereno (1855). Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) and The Kreutzer Sonata (1889). Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) and The Secret Sharer (1910). Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898) and Daisy Miller (1878). Kafka's The Metamorphosis (1915). Camus's The Stranger (1942). Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1937). García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981). Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor (2003). Fleur Jaeggy's Sweet Days of Discipline (1989). Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation (2014).
The form's particular gift: it can sustain one situation across enough pages to develop it psychologically while avoiding the novel's obligation to a full plot.
Three structural moves recur. The single scene — the story is one continuous moment, with backstory provided sparingly. Carver's Cathedral; Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants. The frame — a present-day situation that occasions an embedded story. Conrad's narrators almost always do this. The compressed life — a story that moves across decades by selecting moments. Munro is the master.
Frank O'Connor's The Lonely Voice (1962) — the best book on the form — argued that the short story is fundamentally about "the submerged population group."
The form's natural endings reflect that: not the comic resolution (marriage) or the tragic resolution (death), but the partial acknowledgement, the look back, the door closing somewhere offstage.
The single most-borrowed device: open in medias res, mid-action, mid-thought. The reader catches up. Time saved that the form needs.
The New Yorker publishes one new story per week — the form's most reliable single source for a hundred years. Granta, The Paris Review, n+1, Tin House (defunct but archived), Zoetrope: All-Story, One Story, A Public Space.
The Best American Short Stories series (annual, started 1915, edited each year by a guest editor — recent: George Saunders, Lauren Groff, Min Jin Lee, Jess Walter). The O. Henry Prize Stories (annual). The PEN/O. Henry.
The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story (ed. John Freeman, 2021). The Granta Book of the American Short Story. The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories. The various Norton Anthologies of short fiction. The Best of the Best American Short Stories (2015) anthologises the strongest 50 years of the BASS series.
The short story is a form criticised mostly by other short-story writers. Frank O'Connor's The Lonely Voice (1962). V. S. Pritchett's essays. Eudora Welty's The Eye of the Story (1978). Charles Baxter's Burning Down the House (1997). George Saunders's A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2021) — readings of seven Russian stories with their structures laid bare.
Academic: Mary Rohrberger's Hawthorne and the Modern Short Story (1966). Charles E. May's The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice (1995). Susan Lohafer's Coming to Terms with the Short Story (1983).
The Saunders book in particular is a useful tutorial: it walks through Chekhov's In the Cart, Turgenev's The Singers, Tolstoy's Master and Man, Gogol's The Nose, and shows how each is built. If you read one book on the form, read that one.
↑ Alice Munro · in her own words · 2013 Nobel
Watch · Borges · Firing Line with Buckley
Watch · Anton Chekhov · The Proposal · story analysis
Saunders's A Swim in a Pond in the Rain first. Then O'Connor's The Lonely Voice. Then any 50-story anthology covering the period 1840–2020; The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story is the current best.
Three reasons. The first: density. A great short story does as much as a great novel in 1/20th of the time. You can read The Dead, The Lady with the Dog, and A Good Man Is Hard to Find in one evening; the same evening you would not finish a chapter of Middlemarch. The trade is real — the novel does things the story cannot — but the story's compression is its own pleasure.
The second: the form rewards rereading more than any other prose form. A story you reread three times becomes three different objects. The first read finds out what happens; the second reads back through it knowing; the third sees the structure. With a novel this is impractical for most books. With a story it is the standard way of reading.
The third: many of the best writers of the last century did their best work in the form. Borges, Munro, Carver, O'Connor, Babel, Mansfield, Saunders. Anyone who reads only their novels (when they wrote them) is reading them at half-strength.
Short Fiction — Volume XI, Deck 06 of The Deck Catalog. Set in Bookman with Helvetica Neue for metadata. Ink at #131313; rule and accent in crimson; saffron for emphasis.
Twenty-three leaves on the form designed to do its work in twenty pages. Read one tonight.
↑ Vol. XI · Lit. · Deck 06 / 10