Kelly, meanwhile, seemingly borrows less content from Western tradition, though he relies on its voice. The brief run of the senator from Florida for the highest office in the land is a fierce retort to the insipid and deceitful demands of American democracy. Bradley’s method allows him to convey the pain and folly of his protagonist in terms both surreal and snappy. In the background, he goes about melding the categories of reality, fantasy, and, in one story, something like the Australian Aboriginal concept of “dreamtime.” For Bradley, it might be the dividing line between puppet and the puppet master, considering his subject matter. For Kelly, it’s the distinction between human and animal. To list the ingredients in Bradley’s fiction that work to give it such a wallop might give away its plot, but like Kelly, he collapses distinctions. One approach relies heavily on the culture’s collective knowledge of stories and storytelling this is the strategy favored by Bradley and, to a degree, Robert Kelly in Ten New Fairy Tales. Three recent authors have utilized these methods to demonstrate both their challenges and their advantages. 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.

Wake in the Night by Laura Krughoff