The shortest type of fiction is the short story, which ranges in length from a handful of pages to over thirty pages. Edgar Allan Poe wrote that a short story should not be longer than what a person could read in a single sitting, which he defined as 'requiring from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal.' Poe should know what he's talking about; he wrote well-known stories like 'The Tell-Tale Heart' and 'The Fall of the House of Usher.'