Novels in Three Lines
Published by New York Review Books Classics
Reviewed by Michael Hayward
Novels in Three Lines is an addictive collection of brief items—“true stories of murder, mayhem, and everyday life”—that were first published anonymously in 1906 in the French newspaper Le Matin; I dare you to eat just one. This slim volume would sit comfortably beside its massive cousin: the classic Arcades Project of Walter Benjamin. These epigrammatic “novels” (eventually identified as the work of the anarchist Félix Fénéon) offer excellent examples of narrative art at its most distilled; a close study of them would benefit any would-be novelist.
