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The "short story" type is for works of prose fiction that are shorter than a novel in length. Since there is no universal agreement on what the minimum length for a novel is, there is necessarily a grey area here.
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3,717 Short Story topics matching:
Filter this Collection| x name | x image | x Characters | x Genre | x article |
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| x Enemy Mine | Science fiction |
"Enemy Mine" is a science fiction novella by Barry B. Longyear.
Willis Davidge, a human fighter pilot, is stranded along with Jeriba Shigan, a Drac, on a hostile planet. The Drac are a race of aliens which are reptilian in appearance, and are...
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| x The Great Simoleon Caper | Science fiction |
"The Great Simoleon Caper" is a short story by Neal Stephenson that appeared in TIME Domestic SPECIAL ISSUE, Spring 1995 Volume 145, No. 12 (March 1, 1995). It deals with concepts familiar to Stephenson's fans: encryption, digital currency and...
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| x The Body |
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The Body, or Fall from Innocence is a novella by Stephen King, originally published in King's 1982 collection Different Seasons. It was later adapted into the acclaimed film Stand By Me in 1986.
The story takes place during the summer of 1960 in the...
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| x Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption |
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (1982) is a novella by Stephen King, originally published in Different Seasons. The novella was adapted for the screen in 1994 in the film The Shawshank Redemption. In 2009, the story was also adapted for the...
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| x Apt Pupil | Horror |
Apt Pupil (1982) is a novella by Stephen King, originally published in the 1982 novella collection Different Seasons, subtitled "Summer of Corruption".
Apt Pupil consists of 29 chapters, many of which are headed by a month. Set in a fictional suburb...
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| x Rip Van Winkle |
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"Rip Van Winkle" is a short story by the American author Washington Irving published in 1819, as well as the name of the story's fictional protagonist. Written while Irving was living in Birmingham, England, it was part of a collection entitled The...
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| x The Premature Burial |
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Horror |
"The Premature Burial" is a horror short story on the theme of being buried alive, written by Edgar Allan Poe and published in 1844 in The Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper. Fear of being buried alive was common in this period and Poe was taking...
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| x The Tell-Tale Heart |
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Gothic fiction |
"The Tell-Tale Heart" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe first published in 1843. It follows an unnamed narrator who insists on his sanity after murdering an old man with a "vulture eye". The murder is carefully calculated, and the murderer hides...
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| x The Fall of the House of Usher |
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Roderick Usher | Gothic fiction |
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published September 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. It was slightly revised in 1840 for the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. It contains within it the...
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| Madeleine Usher | Horror | |||
| The Guest | ||||
| x The Pit and the Pendulum |
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"The Pit and the Pendulum" is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe and first published in 1842. The story is about the torments endured by a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, though Poe skews historical facts. The narrator of the story...
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| x The Black Cat |
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Horror |
"The Black Cat" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. It was first published in the August 19, 1843, edition of The Saturday Evening Post. It is a study of the psychology of guilt, often paired in analysis with Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart". In both, a...
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| Gothic fiction | ||||
| x “The Chink and the Clock People” |
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| x “The Towers of St. Ignatz” |
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| x The Small Rain | ||||
| x Low-Lands | ||||
| x Entropy | ||||
| x Under the Rose | ||||
| x The Secret Integration | ||||
| x Mortality and Mercy in Vienna | ||||
| x The Oval Portrait | Horror |
"The Oval Portrait" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe involving the disturbing circumstances surrounding a portrait in a chateau. It is one of his shortest stories, filling only two pages in its initial publication in 1842.
The tale begins with an...
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| x William Wilson |
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Short story |
"William Wilson" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1839, with a setting inspired by Poe's formative years outside of London. The tale follows the theme of the doppelgänger and is written in a style based on rationality. It also...
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| x The Devil in the Belfry | Short story |
"The Devil in the Belfry" is a satirical short story by Edgar Allan Poe. It was first published in 1839.
In an isolated town called Vondervotteimittis, the punctilious inhabitants seem to be concerned with nothing but clocks and cabbage. This...
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| x Ligeia |
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Ligeia | Horror |
"Ligeia" is an early short story written by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1838. The story follows an unnamed narrator and his wife Ligeia, a beautiful and intelligent raven-haired woman. She falls ill, composes "The Conqueror Worm", and quotes...
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| Rowena | ||||
| x The Gold-Bug |
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Short story |
"The Gold-Bug" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Set on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, the plot follows William Legrand, who was recently bitten by a gold-colored bug. His servant Jupiter fears him to be going insane and goes to Legrand's...
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| x The Unparalled Adventures of One Hans Pfall | ||||
| x Four Beasts in One | ||||
| x The Murders in the Rue Morgue |
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Auguste Dupin | Detective fiction |
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe published in Graham's Magazine in 1841. It has been claimed as the first detective story; Poe referred to it as one of his "tales of ratiocination". Similar works predate Poe's...
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| Locked room mystery | ||||
| x The Mystery of Marie Roget |
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Auguste Dupin | Detective fiction |
"The Mystery of Marie Rogêt", often subtitled A Sequel to "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe written in 1842. This is the first murder mystery based on the details of a real crime. It first appeared in Snowden's...
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| x The Balloon-Hoax |
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Monck Mason |
"The Balloon-Hoax" is the title used in collections and anthologies of a newspaper article written by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1844. Originally presented as a true story, it detailed European Monck Mason's trip across the Atlantic Ocean...
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| x The Purloined Letter |
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Auguste Dupin | Detective fiction |
"The Purloined Letter" is a short story by American author Edgar Allan Poe. It is the third of his three detective stories featuring the fictional C. Auguste Dupin, the other two being "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt"...
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| x The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherezade | ||||
| x A Descent into the Maelstrom |
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Sea story |
"A Descent into the Maelström" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. In the tale, a man recounts how he survived a shipwreck and a whirlpool. It has been grouped with Poe's tales of ratiocination and also labeled an early form of science fiction....
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| x Von Kempelen and his Discovery | ||||
| x Mesmeric Revelation | ||||
| x The Island of the Fay | ||||
| x The Assignation | ||||
| x The Domain of Arnheim | ||||
| x Landor's Cottage | ||||
| x Berenice |
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"Berenice" is a short horror story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835. The story follows a man named Egaeus who is preparing to marry his cousin Berenice. He has a tendency to fall into periods of intense...
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| x The Spectacles |
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Adolphus Simpson | Comedy |
"The Spectacles" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1844. It is one of Poe's comedy tales.
The narrator, 22-year old Napoleon Buonaparte, changes his last name from "Froissart" to "Simpson" as a requirement to inherit a large sum from...
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| Madame Eugenie Lalande | Short story | |||
| Napoleon Buonaparte Froissart | ||||
| x King Pest |
"King Pest", also called "King Pest the First -- A Tale Containing an Allegory" is a short story by American writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe, first published in the Southern Literary Messenger in Sept. 1835.
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| x Three Sundays in a Week | ||||
| x The Million Pound Bank Note | ||||
| x Report on the Barnhouse Effect | Short story |
"Report on the Barnhouse Effect" is the first Kurt Vonnegut's ever wrote and published short story. It originally appeared in September 1950 in Collier's Weekly. It is also part of the collection Welcome to the Monkey House.
The protagonist,...
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| x Welcome to the Monkey House |
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Dystopia |
"Welcome to the Monkey House" is a Kurt Vonnegut short story that is part of the collection Welcome to the Monkey House. It is alluded to in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater as one of Kilgore Trout's stories.
"Welcome to the Monkey House" takes place in...
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| x Harrison Bergeron | Harrison Bergeron | Science fiction |
"Harrison Bergeron" is a satirical, dystopian science fiction short story written by Kurt Vonnegut and first published in October 1961. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the story was re-published in the author's...
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| Diana Moon-Glampers | Dystopia | |||
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| x Who Am I This Time? |
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In 1982, Hinckley, Illinois served as stand-in for fictional North Crawford in Jonathan Demme's television film adaptation of Who Am I This Time? by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.. Christopher Walken portrays a painfully shy hardware store clerk. Susan Sarandon...
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| x All the King's Horses | Short story |
"All the King's Horses" is a short story written in or before 1951 by Kurt Vonnegut. It can be found in his collection of short stories Welcome to the Monkey House. It derives its title from a line in the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme.
The story takes...
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| x Memory | The daemon of the valley |
"Memory" is a flash fiction short story by American horror and science fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in 1919 and published in May 1923 in The National Amateur.
"Memory" uses many of H. P. Lovecraft's common images and ideas, such as relics...
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| The genie that haunts the moonbeams | ||||
| x "Aye, and Gomorrah..." |
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Science fiction |
"Aye, and Gomorrah..." is a famous science fiction short story by Samuel R. Delany. It is Delany's first sold short story, and won the 1967 Nebula Award for best short story. Before it appeared in Driftglass and Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories,...
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| x Rain, Rain, Go Away |
"Rain, Rain, Go Away" is a short story by Isaac Asimov. A fantasy rather than a science fiction story, it was based on an idea by Bob Mills, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but rejected by him. It was instead published in the...
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| x Once More to the Lake |
"Once More to the Lake" is an essay first published in Harper's magazine in 1941 by author E. B. White. It chronicles his pilgrimage back to a lakefront resort he visited as a child.
In "Once More to the Lake," White revisits his ideal boyhood...
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| x The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands | Horror |
"The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands" is a short story by Stephen King first published in the 1982 horror anthology Shadows 4, edited by Charles L. Grant, and collected in Skeleton Crew in 1985.
Like the novella "The Breathing Method" from King's...
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| x The Raft | Horror |
The Raft is a horror short story by Stephen King first published as a booklet included with Gallery magazine in November 1982, and collected in the 1985 Skeleton Crew anthology.
"The Raft" is about four college students, two young men (Randy and...
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| Short story | ||||
| x The Temple | Short story |
"The Temple" is a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft in 1920, and first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in February 1925. It was the first story Lovecraft published in Weird Tales, and indeed was his first publication in any...
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| x Micromégas | Science fiction |
Micromégas (1752) is a short story written in the 18th century by the French philosopher and satirist Voltaire. It is a significant development in the history of literature because it originates ideas which helped create the genre of science fiction...
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| x Smith of Wootton Major |
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Fantasy |
Smith of Wootton Major, first published in 1967, is a novella by J. R. R. Tolkien.
The book began as an attempt to explain the meaning of Faery by means of a story about a cook and his cake. This was intended to be part of a preface by Tolkien to...
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| x I See You Never | Science fiction |
"I See You Never" is a short story by author Ray Bradbury. This story was originally published in 1947 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc. It is included in the collection A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories (2005).
Mr. Ramirez, a native of Mexico...
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| x What'll We Do With Ragland Park? |
What'll We Do With Ragland Park? is a science fiction short story by Philip K. Dick. First published in Amazing Stories magazine in 1963.
A good example of Dick's bizarre speculation on future media; this prophecy doesn't seem that far from the mark...
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| x What If- |
"What If—" is a fantasy short story by Isaac Asimov that was first published in the Summer 1952 issue of Fantastic and reprinted in the 1969 collection Nightfall and Other Stories. The story was inspired by the author's wife, who challenged him to...
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