A short history of the short story... And how to write it

 Up until the 14th century, short stories were mainly used to convey religious morals. With Boccaccio's The Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the shift moved from the sacred to the profane by focusing on human folly instead.

The English short story changed from verse into prose in the 15th century, but it didn't really begin to emerge as a form until the 19th century when it took off among American writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. In the UK, such writers as Thomas Hardy mastered the genre: his Wessex Tales (1888) was the first succesful short story by a British author.

Short stories went from strength to strength in the 20th century, partly because the rise in literary magazines and journals created a market for the genre.

The genre has suffered a bit of a decline in recent years. At least enough for writer Margaret Wilkinson to launch the Save our Short Story campaign in 2002. Join the fight and subscribe to the Endangered Species online anthology of stories by both known and new writers.

Classic Fiction: Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque by Edgar Allan Poe

Probably published in 1839, this was the first collection of short stories that Edgar Allan Poe produced. In two volumes, it comprised 25 tales, among them "The Fall of the House of Usher", "MS. Found in the Bottle", "William Wilson" and "The Assignation".

The latter is set in Venice, where the narrator witnesses his friend rescue the drowning child of Marchesa Aphrodite, whose husband surreptitiously looks on as they arrange an assignation after midnight. The traces of a romance between the two are revealed to the narrator who later discovers they were both poisoned.
"The fall of the House of Usher" is perhaps the most famous tale from the collection. It recounts the metaphoric and quite literal collapse of both the house and the family.

"MS. Found in the Bottle" is the bizarre story of the storm at sea which flings the narrator from one ship to another. As the sole survivor of the first shipwreck, he now finds himself alone among the sailors on the ghostly vessel. He writes the manuscript of the title, whose last entry tells of a coming storm.

"William Wilson" is a classic doppelgänger story, of two William Wilsons whose presence disturbs one another at school and in adulthood until they fight in a duel where one dies proclaiming that the other is dead, too.
Poe's stories are startlingly original, often disturbing and frequently macabre.