The short story is a literary genre of fiction, prose narrative that tends to be more concise and "to the point" than longer works of fiction such as novella (in the modern sense of the term) and novel.Short stories have their origins in oral story-telling traditions and the prose anecdote, a swiftly-sketched situation that comes rapidly to its point. With the rise of the comparatively realistic novel, the short story evolved as a miniature version, with some of its first perfectly independent examples in the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Anton Chekhov.
Short stories were a staple of early-19th-century magazines and often led to fame and novel-length projects for their authors. More recently, short stories are often collected in anthologies, categorized by topic or critical importance . Many authors today release collections of their short stories.
Some authors are known almost entirely for their short stories, either by choice (they wrote nothing else) or by critical regard (short...
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