Obviously, there is no finite point at which a piece of literature stops being a short story and becomes a novel -- but for the purposes of this paper, I'm going to establish some benchmarks. According to A Handbook to Literature, a short story runs from 500 to 15,000 words -- with a long short story being between 12,000 and 15,000 (480-1). The terms novella, novelette, nouvelle and short novel are virtually interchangeable. The Handbook suggests that a novelette is "longer than a short story and shorter than a novel" (360). It further describes a short novel as being between 15,000 and 50,000 words (479). This gap strikes me as too broad, so I prefer Gardner's finer definition, that a novella is between 30,000 and 50,000 words (179). And novels are beyond 50,000 words, according to a variety of sources, including the Handbook and E.M. Forster, who said in 1927, "Any fictitious prose work over 50,000 words will be [considered] a novel. . ." (6).
