The modernista short story was one of the earliest and most successful by-products of the narrative experiments carried out by the modernistas within the brief confines of the crónica. Indeed, the modernistas’ modernizing penchant focused almost as intensely on the short story genre as on poetry itself. Significantly, Rubén Darío's first great literary success was achieved with Azul… (1888), a collection of short stories accompanied by a handful of poems. Like Darío, the early modernista Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, despite his prestige as a poet, also chose a short story collection as his first published work. Cuentos frágiles (1883) was Nájera's first and only book published during his lifetime, and it is also the first book of modernista short stories. Many of Nájera's stories in Cuentos frágiles (and in posthumously collected anthologies such as Cuentos color de humo [Stories the Color of Smoke], 1898) had their origin as journalistic chronicles, or parts of chronicles. Nájera often imbedded his fictions superficially in a journalistic context, from which they could be easily detached and collected as short stories; this is the case with tales such as “La novela del tranvía” (The Street-Car Novel), “La venganza de Mylord” (Mylord's Revenge), and “La hija del aire.” Sometimes, however, the journalistic element is inseparable from the fictional narrative, as in “Los amores del cometa” (The Loves of the Comet), Nájera's fanciful description of the Great September Comet of 1882, or the dream-like “La odisea de Madame Théo” (Madame Théo's Oddyssey), whose protagonist is the real-life French singer Louise Théo.

Why this particular interest of the modernistas in the short story? As usual, there was a variety of reasons: to begin with, the modernistas gravitated towards whatever was perceived as new or modern, and the literary short story, despite its long and distinguished history harking back to the Middle Ages, had recently undergone a virtual reinvention in the work of Edgar Allan Poe.