A short story is not simply a short novel. In the past studies into smaller works tended to use length to define the difference, and to draw distinctions between the sketch, anecdote, and novella. However, throughout its history from the nineteenth century to present, the short story as a genre has hardly been locked into this single structure. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the short story has attracted a broad international range of writers, realists and post-modernists, who have taken the genre beyond local traditions and continued to innovate formally.

This Very Short Introduction provides a clear analysis of the techniques and themes common to the genre of short stories on an international scale. Charting the rise of the short story from magazines and newspapers largely in the United States and Great Britain, Andrew Kahn gives a account of the form's essential techniques. He considers the stability and variation marking treatments of key structures of the story such as the beginning, the use of voice, the ironic turn or plot twist, and how writers manage endings. Throughout Kahn draws on examples from this wide and flourishing corpus of work, from the short stories of Angela Carter and Anton Chekhov to James Baldwin, Alice Munro, Guy de Maupassant, and Carson McCullers, following their thematic threads to discuss form and content.

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Andrew Kahn, Professor of Russian Literature, Professor of Russian Literature, University of Oxford

Andrew Kahn is a Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Oxford. His publications include books on Alexander Pushkin and Osip Mandelstam. He has edited a number of books for Oxford World's Classics series, including Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time (2013); Alexander Pushkin, The Queen of Spades and Other Stories (2009); and Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories (2015). He is also a Fellow of the British Academy.

Preface
1. The Rise of the Short Story
2. Openings
3. Voices
4. Place
5. The Plot Thickens...and Thins
6. Ironies and Reversals
7. Chekhov's Heirs
8. Endings
References, Further Reading, Secondary Literature
Index