Novella versus novel

In German and Dutch, the word for "novella" is Novelle (German) and novelle (Dutch), and the word for "novel" is Roman (German) and roman (Dutch). In French "novella" is nouvelle and "novel" is roman. In Romanian "novella" is nuvelǎ and "novel" is roman. In Swedish "short story" is novell and "novel" is roman. In Danish and Norwegian"novella"/"short story" is novelle and "novel" is roman. This etymological distinction avoids confusion of the literatures and the forms, with the novel being the more important, established fictional form. The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig's (1881-1942) Die Schachnovelle (1942) (literally, "The Chess Novella", but translated in 1944 as The Royal Game) is an example of a title naming its genre.

Commonly, longer novellas are referred to as novels; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Heart of Darkness are sometimes called novels, as are many science fiction works such as The War of the Worlds and Armageddon 2419 A.D.. Occasionally, longer works are referred to as novellas, with some academics positing 100,000 words as the novella‒novel threshold.

Stephen King, in his introduction to Different Seasons, an anthology of four of his novellas, has called the novella "an ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic"[2]; King notes the difficulties of selling a novella in the commercial publishing world, since it does not fit the typical length requirements of either magazine or book publishers. Despite these problems, however, the novella's length provides unique advantages; in the introduction to a novella anthology titled Sailing to Byzantium, Robert Silverberg writes:

[The novella] is one of the richest and most rewarding of literary forms...it allows for more extended development of theme and character than does the short story, without making the elaborate structural demands of the full-length book. Thus it provides an intense, detailed exploration of its subject, providing to some degree both the concentrated focus of the short story and the broad scope of the novel. [3]

In his essay 'Briefly, the case for the novella,' Canadian author George Fetherling (who wrote the novella Tales of Two Cities) said that to reduce the novella to nothing more than a short novel is like "saying a pony is a baby horse." [4]