A novella is a short what?

A novella is a text of written, fictional, narrative prose normally longer than a short story but shorter than a novel, somewhere between 7,500 and 40,000 words. The English word "novella" derives from the Italian novella, feminine of novello, which means "new". The novella is a common literary genre in several European languages.

The novella as a literary genre began developing in the early Renaissance by the Italian and French literatura, principally Giovanni Boccaccio, author of 'The Decameron' (1353). 'The Decameron' featured 100 tales (novellas) told by 10 people (seven women and three men) fleeing the Black Death, by escaping from Florence to the Fiesole hills in 1348.

Not until the late 18th and early 19th centuries did writers fashion the novella into a literary genre structured by precepts and rules, generally in a realistic mode. At that time, the Germans were the most active writers of the novella. For the German writer, a novella is a fictional narrative of indeterminate length (a few pages to hundreds) restricted to a single, suspenseful event, situation, or conflict leading to an unexpected turning point (Wendepunkt), provoking a logical but surprising end.