Short Stories

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From the medieval era to the Renaissance, various cultures adopted short fiction for their own purposes. Even the aggressive, grim spirit of the invading Germanic barbarians was amenable to expression in short prose. The myths and sagas extant in Scandinavia and Iceland indicate the kinds of bleak and violent tales the invaders took with them into southern Europe. In contrast, the romantic imagination and high spirits of the Celts remained manifest in their tales.

Wherever they appeared—in Ireland, Wales, or Brittany—stories steeped in magic and splendour also appeared. This spirit, easily recognized in such Irish mythological tales as Longes mac n-Uislenn probably 9th-century , infused the chivalric romances that developed somewhat later on the Continent. Many, but not all, of the romances are too long to be considered short stories.

The latter was gifted as a creator of the short narrative poems known as the Breton lays. Only occasionally did a popular short romance like Aucassin and Nicolette 13th century fail to address any of the three Matters. Also widely respected was the exemplum , a short didactic tale usually intended to dramatize or otherwise inspire model behaviour. Of all the exempla, the best known in the 11th and 12th centuries were the lives of the saints, some of which are extant.

Among the common people of the late Middle Ages there appeared a literary movement counter to that of the romance and exemplum. All were important as short narratives, but perhaps the most intriguing of the three are the fabliaux. First appearing around the middle of the 12th century, fabliaux remained popular for years, attracting the attention of Boccaccio and Chaucer. Some fabliaux are extant, all in verse. Often, the medieval storyteller—regardless of the kind of tale he preferred—relied on a framing circumstance that made possible the juxtaposition of several stories, each of them relatively autonomous.

Since there was little emphasis on organic unity, most storytellers preferred a flexible format, one that allowed tales to be added or removed at random with little change in effect. Such a format is found in The Seven Sages of Rome , a collection of stories so popular that nearly every European country had its own translation.

Great Short Stories

The framing circumstance in The Seven Sages involves a prince condemned to death; his advocates the seven sages relate a new story each day, thereby delaying the execution until his innocence is made known. This technique is clearly similar to that of The Thousand and One Nights , components of which can be dated to as early as the 8th century but which was not translated as a single collection in Europe until the 18th century. In both the Persian and Arabian versions of the frame, the clever Scheherazade avoids death by telling her king-husband a thousand stories. The versatility Chaucer displays in The Canterbury Tales — reflects the versatility of the age.

This short list hardly exhausts the catalogue of forms Chaucer experimented with. By relating tale to teller and by exploiting relationships among the various tellers, Chaucer endowed The Canterbury Tales with a unique, dramatic vitality. Where Chaucer reveals a character through actions and assertions, Boccaccio seems more interested in stories as pieces of action.

With Boccaccio, the characters telling the stories, and usually the characters within, are of subordinate interest. Like Chaucer, Boccaccio frames his well-wrought tales in a metaphoric context. The trip to the shrine at Canterbury provides a meaningful backdrop against which Chaucer juxtaposes his earthy and pious characters.

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Behind every story, in effect, is the inescapable presence of the Black Death. The Decameron , likely written between and , is fashioned out of a variety of sources, including fabliaux, exempla, and short romances. Immediately popular, the Decameron produced imitations nearly everywhere in western Europe. In Italy alone, there appeared at least 50 writers of novelle as short narratives were called after Boccaccio. Learning from the success and artistry of Boccaccio and, to a lesser degree, his contemporary Franco Sacchetti , Italian writers for three centuries kept the Western world supplied with short narratives.

Sacchetti was no mere imitator of Boccaccio. Two other well-known narrative writers of the 14th century, Giovanni Fiorentino and Giovanni Sercambi, freely acknowledged their imitation of Boccaccio. With Masuccio the popularity of short stories was just beginning to spread.

Analysis of the genre

Almost every Italian in the 16th century, it has been suggested, tried his hand at novelle. Matteo Bandello , the most influential and prolific writer, attempted nearly everything from brief histories and anecdotes to short romances, but he was most interested in tales of deception. Various other kinds of stories appeared. In the early 17th century, Giambattista Basile attempted to infuse stock situations often of the fairy-tale type, such as that of Puss in Boots with realistic details.

The result was often remarkable—a tale of hags or princes with very real motives and feelings. Or, it may be his use of a frame similar to that in the Decameron. This pattern was repeated in France , though the impetus provided by Boccaccio was not felt until the 15th century. As the most influential nation in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, Spain contributed to the proliferation of short prose fiction.

Story #1: What Life is All About

This focus was somewhat new for short fiction, heretofore either didactic or escapist. Despite the presence of these and other popular collections, short narrative in Spain was eventually overshadowed by a new form that began to emerge in the 16th century—the novel. Like the earlier Romans, the Spanish writers of the early Renaissance often incorporated short story material as episodes in a larger whole.

The 17th and 18th centuries mark the temporary decline of short fiction in the West. The causes of this phenomenon are many: Another cause for the disappearance of major works of short fiction is suggested by the growing preference for journalistic sketches. The increasing awareness of other lands and the growing interest in social conditions accommodated by a publication boom produced a plethora of descriptive and biographical sketches. Although these journalistic elements later were incorporated in the fictional short story, for the time being fact held sway over the imagination.

Travel books, criminal biographies, social description, sermons, and essays occupied the market. Only occasionally did a serious story find its way into print, and then it was usually a production of an established writer like Voltaire or Joseph Addison. Perhaps the decline is clearest in England , where the short story had its least secure foothold. It took little to obscure the faint tradition established in the 16th and 17th centuries by the popular jestbooks, by the Palace of Pleasure an anthology of stories, mostly European , and by the few rough stories written by Englishmen e.

During the Middle Ages short fiction had become primarily an amusing and diverting medium. The Renaissance and Enlightenment, however, made different demands of the form. The awakening concern with secular issues called for a new attention to actual conditions. Simply, the diverting stories were no longer relevant or viable. At first only the journalists and pamphleteers responded to the new demand. Short fiction disappeared, in effect, because it did not respond. The modern short story emerged almost simultaneously in Germany , the United States, France, and Russia.

In Germany there had been relatively little difference between the stories of the late 18th century and those in the older tradition of Boccaccio. But a new type of short fiction was near at hand—a type that accepted some of the realistic properties of popular journalism. A short story, for them, had to be realistic. Perhaps sensitive to this qualification, Heinrich von Kleist and E. Another important writer, Ludwig Tieck , explicitly rejected realism as the definitive element in a short story.

As he noted in his preface to the collection of his works and as he demonstrated in his stories, Tieck envisioned the short story as primarily a matter of intensity and ironic inversion. In the United States , the short story, as in Germany , evolved in two strains. On the one hand there appeared the realistic story that sought objectively to deal with seemingly real places, events, or persons. Find this month's featured stories above. You can browse the children library by subgenre or search it for a title, author or keyword. Clicking on an author's name lists all their stories along with further information and links.

Stories can be read online, printed or downloaded for reading offline or on handheld devices. The Hunter and the Bear. The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

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There is no believing a liar, even when he speaks the truth. The Ant and the Grasshopper. Rose surprised us in December when she revealed that she had been rethinking about her own faith since we had our conversation. They gave me a job at the day-care center. I will be celebrating Hanukkah again.

100 Great Short Stories

One day at the start of spring, I came home to find her with my wife in the living room of our apartment, looking scornfully. I was never privy to the conversations my wife had with Rose, but they were certainly bonding closer and closer through the regular afternoon teas. Rose no longer had any qualms befriending people who she had assumed would kill her because of her origin. Like most Indonesian Muslims, we too had grown up with a stereotypical view of Jews. That changed in the months we came to know Rose.

When I returned from the TV station, Rose greeted me at the stairway. Rose would make someone a great mother. My wife later told me she had been waiting for my return all day. And then came what killed whatever remaining suspicions we had of one another. This was in May and we only had a few more months before heading back home. Explaining that she was going to have surgery, Rose showed us a wall safe where she had kept all her valuable possessions, including jewelry, the title to her apartment and bank documents. There were no further instructions.

To our relief, Rose returned from the hospital a few days later. She recovered and was soon back on her feet going about her routine chores, including her day-care job. All good things must come to an end. When we had to fly home at the end of my research work, so ended also our friendship with Rose built over 10 months. We are looking for contemporary fiction between 1, and 2, words by established and new authors.

Stories must be original and previously unpublished in English. The email for submitting stories is: Her big smile somehow eclipsed her small and slouching figure as she extended a greeting hand: Rose was in her mids, a little younger than both our mothers back home.

She squinted and gave each one of us a probing look.

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