What Is the Shortest Novel?

The novel has no minimum word count. The Archive has tested how far that goes.

Defining the novel's minimum

A novel is typically defined by its form (a book-length prose narrative) rather than its content. This means that if the physical form is present — pages, binding, title, author — the question of minimum content is genuinely open. How little can a book contain and still be a book?

Famous very short fiction

Ernest Hemingway's purported six-word story ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn") compresses a full narrative into six words. Flash fiction typically runs under 1,000 words. Micro-fiction under 100. The Archive's books take this further: one word, 261 pages. The word is not six — it is one. The pages are not six — they are 261. This combination may be unprecedented.

The Archive's answer

EW, UGH, LOL, YIKES, and MEH are 261-page books containing a single repeated word. If a novel requires a minimum, these books test it. They have the physical presence of a novel (page count, binding, title, ISBN) with the verbal content of a single dictionary entry. The Archive argues this is a novel — a very specific kind of novel, but a novel.

Frequently asked questions