Short stories

Somewhat erroneously named, this category contains all the pages referring to so-called 'short stories' (which actually includes anything shorter than a book, including articles and essays).

Definition[]

A short story is defined in this wiki thusly:

• a literary work of either fiction or non-fiction,
• of 'sufficient brevity' (see below),
• which is to be read as a whole.

This excludes books, and includes what would normally be called articles or essays. I don't really want to create separate nests of categories for nonfiction books and essays.

'Sufficient brevity'[]

As a reference of interest, the Hugo Award (for scifi and fantasy works) defines a novel as anything exceeding 40,000 words (114 standard pages), a novella as anything exceeding 17,500 words (50 standard pages), and a novelette as anything exceeding 7,500 words (21 standard pages). Anything shorter than that is considered a short story.

I typically make the call on intuition, as I think it's probably more or less obvious what's a short story. I also refer to examples of each with borderline page counts, such as Animal Farm. The changeover point is probably around 50 pages, off the top of my head.