World's Shortest Novels

Friday, February 24, 2012

The Fire

The night was growing colder. So he took off his coat and threw it into the campfire.

Friday, February 10, 2012

Dinner With A Married Couple

"Feed me," he said.

"Bite me," she replied.

Sunday, September 4, 2011

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Suggested by Joe Herring, Jr. - Snopes.com issued "undetermined" rating

Hemingway on a bet said that he could write a story in under 10 words: Here it is: "Classified: Baby Goods. For sale, baby shoes, never worn."

Friday, December 31, 2010

Drinking coffee

After he reached 50, his days became 20 minutes drinking coffee and 23 hours and 40 minutes anticipating drinking coffee.

The Smart Chicken

Of their 18 hens, one was out in the yard every morning. The old man couldn’t find her secret roosting place.

Then his daughter spied the hole in the chicken wire. The hen, she discovered, would go into the coop with the others every night, but was the only one that figured out how to escape.

What could they do with a smart chicken like that?

They ate her.

Unformed Clouds

"I'm from the future," she said. 
"What's the future like?" I asked.
"It's raining," she said.

Examples of good, short novels

Short:
Snoopy’s Novel, 12 July 1965

Part I
It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed.
Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon!
While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.

Part II
A light snow was falling, and the little girl with the tattered shawl had not sold a violet all day.
At that very moment, a young intern at City Hospital was making an important discovery. The mysterious patient in Room 213 had finally awakened. She moaned softly.
Could it be that she was the sister of the boy in Kansas who loved the girl with the tattered shawl who was the daughter of the maid who had escaped from the pirates?
The intern frowned.
“Stampede!” the foreman shouted, and forty thousand head of cattle thundered down on the tiny camp. The two men rolled on the ground grappling beneath the murderous hooves. A left and a right. A left. Another left and right. An uppercut to the jaw. The fight was over. And so the ranch was saved.
The young intern sat by himself in one corner of the coffee shop. He had learned about medicine, but more importantly, he had learned something about life.
THE END

Shorter:
Englewood Entropy
by Anonymous
Chapter 1
Dr. Blanton Tufford, a Stanford University physics professor who studied the structure of the universe, was killed on Sunday when a car crashed into the Englewood, N.J., coffee shop where he was sitting.
The End

Even Shorter:
("The Dinosaur") by Augusto Monterroso.
"Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí."
("When he awoke, the dinosaur was still there.")

Try your hand