Short Story

A common type of Prose Fiction and a good way for new authors to start out. Short stories are any stories that run up to 7,500 words in length, though some definitions place them as long as 20,000. Due to the discrepancy, short stories can overlap with the Novella and the Novelette but are usually categorized separately.

Short stories are usually published in magazines and, more rarely, collections. There is a large Pulp Magazine industry that is much easier to break into than the book industry, which makes it a good place for a new writer to build up a resume. And a good place to stage Old Shame.

More info can be found at The Other Wiki.

Pseudopod.org makes a job of publishing audio version of short stories.


 * Most of what H.P. Lovecraft wrote was in the form of a short story. These include:
 * "The Call Of Cthulhu"
 * "Pickmans Model"
 * "Herbert West: Reanimator"
 * "The Horror At Red Hook"
 * "The Cats of Ulthar"
 * "The Dunwich Horror"
 * "The Colour Out of Space"
 * Robert E. Howard also made his career on short fiction, with every Conan the Barbarian story save The Hour of the Dragon being a short story.
 * "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" was both short, and a story.
 * I, Robot was a series of short stories by Isaac Asimov.
 * "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell
 * "Arcana Magi Zero" is a Web Original short story trilogy written by H-M Brown.
 * "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson
 * "There Will Come Soft Rains", a Ray Bradbury classic.
 * "Brokeback Mountain" was originally a short story by Annie Proulx.
 * "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" was originally a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
 * "The Ugly Barnacle", from SpongeBob SquarePants, is one of these, with emphasis on "short".
 * "The Dandelion Girl" by Robert F. Young.
 * "Magic for Beginners" by Kelly Link.
 * "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner
 * "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges
 * Most of the Transformers Timelines fiction consists of short stories, and issues of The Transformers comics and Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers had short stories published in them occasionally.
 * The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers is a short story collection.
 * The shortest story ever is apparently by Margaret Atwood. It goes, "Longed for him. Got him. Shit".
 * Tying for that title is Ernest Hemingway's bet-winning short story. "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
 * Robert Westall wrote a great deal of what some consider his best work in short fiction form; notably Break of Dark and the best-of anthologies Demons and Shadows and Shades of Darkness.