Since then, writers have used a number of strategies to condense character, plot, language, humor, and message into ever smaller textual spaces. The 1970s saw a “resurgent interest” in the form with the work of the minimalist Raymond Carver and Angela Carter’s reconfigured fairy tales. Botha lists, among the more recent, if unrecognized purveyors of microfiction, Kafka, Chekhov, Stein, Beckett, Bernstein, Hemingway, and Borges. Aesop told his anthropomorphic parables in the fifth century before Christ. Marc Botha, whose 2016 essay on microfictions is included in The Cambridge Companion to the English Short Story, calls these miniatures a “marginalized genre.” Yet it has been with us for centuries. This is the art of microfiction, a genre that has been evolving ever more rapidly with the rise of social media and shortened attention spans. The combination, in such a confined text, is devastating, as emotional as it is efficient. Some are as contemporary as a Lady Gaga hit song. Bradley provides his readers with multiple avenues of interpretation to this volume. Or perhaps it could carry a whiff of victory, depending on how the previous pages, all twenty-six of them, are read. The candidate faces a reckoning not only with the voters but also with himself, and it’s not pretty. Bradley’s On the Campaign Trail, which promises a you-are-there look into a senator’s bid to become president, is unambiguous.
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