You're staring at a blank page, or maybe a half-finished essay, and you've got this killer quote from Flannery O’Connor or Ted Chiang. Then you realize you have no idea how to cite a short story properly. It's frustrating. Honestly, it’s one of those things that seems like it should be simple until you actually try to do it and realize the story is buried inside an anthology, which is inside a collection, edited by someone who isn't the author.
Style guides change. Professors are picky.
Most people mess this up because they treat a short story like a standalone book. It isn't. Unless you're reading a Kindle single, that story lives inside a larger ecosystem. Whether you’re using MLA, APA, or Chicago, the logic is basically the same: you have to give credit to the person who wrote the words and tell the reader exactly where you found them. If you found it on a random PDF on a university website, that’s a different ballgame than a leather-bound collection.
Why Citing Short Stories Is Actually Kind of Tricky
The "container" concept is the most important thing to grasp. Think of the short story as the "item" and the book it’s in as the "container." In MLA 9—which is what most humanities students are using right now—you're looking for a specific flow. You need the author's name, the title of the story in quotation marks, the title of the book in italics, the editor (if there is one), the publisher, the year, and the page range.
If you leave out the page range, you’re asking for trouble.
Academic integrity isn't just about not cheating; it’s about leaving a breadcrumb trail. If I’m reading your analysis of "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson, I might want to see the specific version you read. Was it the original New Yorker publication from 1948 or a modern Penguin Classics reprint? The pagination will be totally different.
The MLA Way: The Gold Standard for Literature
Since most people looking for how to cite a short story are writing for an English or Comp class, MLA is the heavy hitter. It's less about the date of publication and more about the author and the location of the text.
Here is what a standard entry looks like if you’re pulling from an anthology:
Author Last Name, First Name. "Title of Short Story." Title of Anthology, edited by First Name Last Name, Publisher, Year, pp. xxx-xxx.
Let's look at a real-world example. Say you're citing "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien from a common textbook. It would look like this:
O’Brien, Tim. "The Things They Carried." The Norton Introduction to Literature, edited by Kelly J. Mays, Shorter 14th ed., W. W. Norton, 2022, pp. 425-38.
Notice the "pp." for multiple pages. If the story is only one page—highly unlikely but possible—it’s just "p." Also, keep those quotation marks around the story title. Italics are reserved for the "big" thing (the book).
What if it's online?
Things get messy here. If you found the story on a website like The Atlantic or Electric Literature, you swap the book title for the website name and add the URL. Skip the "https://" to keep it clean unless your instructor is a stickler for the old ways.
APA Style: The Social Science Pivot
You might be using APA if you're in a psychology or sociology class discussing the narrative impact of trauma or something similar. APA cares way more about the "when." The year of publication is moved up right next to the author's name. It feels more clinical.
The structure shifts to:
Author, A. A. (Year). Title of story. In E. E. Editor (Ed.), Title of book (pp. xxx–xxx). Publisher.
For that same Tim O'Brien story, an APA citation would look like this:
O’Brien, T. (2022). The things they carried. In K. J. Mays (Ed.), The Norton introduction to literature (Shorter 14th ed., pp. 425–438). W. W. Norton.
Sentence case is the rule for titles in APA. Only the first word and proper nouns get capitalized. It looks weird to people used to MLA, but that’s the vibe.
Chicago Style: For the History Buffs
Chicago Style (specifically the Notes and Bibliography system) is the most formal. It uses footnotes. If you see those tiny numbers at the bottom of a page, that’s Chicago.
For the bibliography entry, you're looking at:
Last Name, First Name. "Title of Story." In Title of Book, edited by First Name Last Name, page range. City: Publisher, Year.
Chicago is the only one that still sometimes wants the city of publication, though the 17th edition has started to relax on that. Still, if you’re using it, be precise. It's the "suit and tie" of citation styles.
The "One Author" Collection Exception
Sometimes a writer publishes a whole book of their own stories. Think Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. In this case, there is no "Editor." You just skip that part.
Example:
Carver, Raymond. "Gazebo." What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Knopf, 1981, pp. 21-29.
It’s cleaner. Simpler. But you still need those page numbers. Without them, you're just citing the whole book, which isn't what you're doing if you're specifically talking about one story.
Common Mistakes People Make (And How to Avoid Them)
One: Confusing the editor with the author. The person who wrote the story is the author. The person who put the book together is the editor. Don’t credit the editor for the genius of the prose.
Two: Forgetting the "In" in APA and Chicago. That little word "In" is a signal to the reader that we are looking at a part of a whole.
Three: Punctuation inside vs. outside quotes. In MLA, the period goes inside the closing quotation mark for the story title unless there’s a parenthetical citation right after it in the text. In the Works Cited list, it's always inside.
In-Text Citations: The Ground Level
When you’re actually writing the essay, you can’t just drop a quote and keep moving. You need a parenthetical.
For MLA, it's (Author Page). No comma.
Example: (O'Brien 427).
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For APA, it's (Author, Year, p. Page).
Example: (O'Brien, 2022, p. 427).
If you mention the author's name in the sentence—"O'Brien argues that..."—you don't need to repeat it in the parentheses. Just put the page number. It keeps the prose flowing better. You want the reader to focus on your argument, not your punctuation.
Digital Sources and PDFs
If you’re citing a story from a PDF you found online, try to see if it’s a scan of a real book. If it is, cite it like a book. If it's just a web page, you have to treat it like an "Article on a Website."
The rule of thumb: find the most "original" version possible. A scanned PDF of a 1950s literary journal is better than a copy-pasted version on a personal blog. Credibility matters.
Actionable Steps for Your Bibliography
Start by identifying your "containers." Is the story in a book? A magazine? A website?
Check the copyright page of the book you’re holding. It has everything: the publisher, the year, and often the original publication history of the stories.
Use a citation generator if you must, but double-check the results. They are notoriously bad at handling "stories within a book." They often skip the editor or get the italics wrong.
Keep a running list as you read. There is nothing worse than finishing a ten-page paper at 3:00 AM and realizing you didn't write down the page numbers for your quotes.
Verify the style guide version. MLA 9 is different from MLA 7. APA 7 is different from APA 6. Most schools have a library page that tells you exactly which one they expect.
Open a blank document and format your "Works Cited" or "References" page before you even start the first paragraph. It feels like a small win, and it ensures you won't skip the most important part of academic writing: giving credit where it's due.