Oxford dictionary of literary terms, via Oxford reference online, Nov. 9, 2012 (short story: A fictional prose tale of no specified length, but too short to be published as a volume on its own, as novellas sometimes and novels usually are; a short story will normally concentrate on a single event with only one or two characters, more economically than a novel's sustained exploration of social background; there are similar fictional forms of greater antiquity--fables, lais, folktales, parables, and the French conte--but the short story as we know it flourished in the magazines of the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially in the USA, which has a particularly strong tradition)