Novella is a prose narrative longer than a short story but shorter than a novel, typically focused on a single conflict.
The novella — from the Italian for 'small new thing' — emerged in 14th-century Italy with Boccaccio's 'Decameron' (1353), a frame collection of one hundred short tales told over ten days. The modern novella runs roughly 17,000 to 40,000 words and occupies a particular middle ground: too long for the magazine, too short for the standalone book, perfectly sized for one extended afternoon of reading. The form has produced some of literature's most concentrated masterpieces — Tolstoy's 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich', Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness', Henry James's 'The Turn of the Screw', Kafka's 'The Metamorphosis', Camus's 'The Stranger'. The novella demands compression: there is no room for subplots, but there is room for the slow unfolding of a single moral or psychological crisis, which is what the form does best.