José María Merino: teoría y práctica del microrrelato

Abstract

The short short-story is flourishing in recent decades. It is defined by its acute brevity and its intense narrativity, its concentrated form and expressive economy underpinned by its elliptical and suggestive nature. Although there have been instances of short short-stories since the beginnings of the literary form, this narrative genre begins to take shapre in the Romantic and modernist periods, and develops fully in the twentieth century, in the writings of J. R. Jiménez and R. Gómez de la serna in spain and, in latin America, in those of Borges, A. monterroso y J. Cortázar. It becomes consolidated as the fourth narrative genre at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. José María Merino is one of the spanish writers who has done most to contribute to the development of the theory of the short short-story and is widely considered one of the best creators of the mini-fictions representative of this narrative mode. His first collection of short short-stories is La glorieta de los fugitivos. Minificción completa (2007), to which he has since added others to be found amongst the short stories of El libro de las horas contadas (2011) and those grouped in the third part of La trama oculta (cuentos de los dos lados con una silva mínima) (2014).