Literature Glossary
Don’t be an oxymoron. Know your literary terms.
Over 200 literary terms, Shmooped to perfection.
Short Story
Definition:
A form of narrative fiction, the short story has characters and plot, just like a novel, but it's, you know, shorter. Wow, we really just rocked your world, huh?
Short stories resemble other short form genres like apologue and fable, but the genre really took off in the 19th century with peeps like Edgar Allan Poe and Anton Chekhov. And Most writers of literary fiction today have at least dabbled in them, if not dived in whole hog, like an awesome lady named Alice Munro, who writes almost exclusively in the form.