a short piece of prose fiction usu dealing with only a few characters and incidents
The short story originally goes back to the legend of the fairy tale. In the Romantic period it was refined, above all by Edgar Allen Poe, as a ‘poetic’ concentrated form. Now it suggests a tale about a single incident told from a single perspective in a single sitting, in a distinct voice, without a word wasted. Great practitioners include Tolstoy, Chekhov, Joyce, Maupassant, James, Mann, Hemingway, and Lawrence — Professor Malcolm Bradbury