Novella
A novella is a short, prose fiction work, like the word "novel", it derives from the Italian word for new.
The origin of the novella genre can be linked to the early Italian Renaissance work of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), author of The Decameron, a series of one hundred novellas told by ten people, seven women and three men, fleeing the Black Death by escaping from Florence to the hills of Fiesole, in 1348.
In English, a novella is a story mid-way—in length and complexity—between a short story and a novel, and is focused on a single chain of events with a surprising turning point. Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) are examples of English novellas.
It is common for longer novellas to be addressed as novels, if incorrectly, e.g. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Heart of Darkness are commonly referred to as novels, as are many science fiction works such as War of the Worlds and Armageddon 2419 A.D.. Occasionally, longer works have are referred to as novellas, with some academics giving 100,000 words as the threshold between a the novella and the novel.
In the science fiction genre, the Hugo and Nebula literary awards define the novella as: "A...story of between seventeen thousand five hundred (17,500) and forty thousand (40,000) words."
In German, the English word novella is novelle and novel is roman, thereby, there is less confusion between the literatures; the novel being the more important, established fictional form. An example carrying the word in its title is "Die Schachnovelle" (1942) ["The Check Novel"], by Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), translated, in 1944, as The Royal Game.
See also:
Novella is a commune of the Haute-Corse département in France, on the island of Corsica.