Novels in Three Lines

Author(s): Felix Feneon

Short Stories | Translated fiction | Humour & Satire | France

A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL "Novels in Three Lines" collects more than a thousand items that appeared anonymously in the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906--true stories of murder, mayhem, and everyday life presented with a ruthless economy that provokes laughter even as it shocks. This extraordinary trove, undiscovered until the 1940s and here translated for the first time into English, is the work of the mysterious Felix Feneon. Dandy, anarchist, and critic of genius, the discoverer of Georges Seurat and the first French publisher of James Joyce, Feneon carefully maintained his own anonymity, toiling for years as an obscure clerk in the French War Department. "Novels in Three Lines" is his secret chef-d'oeuvre, a work of strange and singular art that brings back the long-ago year of 1906 with the haunting immediacy of a photograph while looking forward to such disparate works as Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and the Death and Disaster series of Andy Warhol.


Product Information

"In these artfully concise summaries of news events, Feneon, an enigmatic French journalist and publisher, provides a glimpse of a belle epoque that belongs not to artists or intellectuals but to locksmiths, plumbers, seamstresses and the occasional sex offender." --"Los Angeles Times
"In 1906, suspected terrorist, anarchist, and literary instigator Felix Feneon wrote more than a thousand small bits for the Paris newspaper "Le Matin." Each was a bizarre yet enigmatic, fragmentary, often scandalous, report." "--"Steven Heller, im"Print" "

"A Parisian anarchist, dandy and literary editor born in 1861, Feneon was at his most eloquent when saying as little as possible." Novels in Three Lines "is a collection of what newspaper editors used to call squibs - very short news items, similar to the sentence fragments that populate modern cable news crawls. The book collects more than 1,000 news items (what the French call faits divers) printed in Le Matin in 1906, all anonymously written by Feneon. Century-old one-liners from French fishwrap might sound like a shaky premise for a book, but these true-life tales of murder, revenge, suicide, deceit and religious strife feature the fine carpentry of a literary stylist." --"Toronto Star"

"Veering from horrific to hilarious and offering an acute overview of life at the time, these ultra-condensed tales of politics and mayhem hover between poetry and prose and redefine nonfiction... it is a seminal modernist masterpiece of form and sensibility, and still provocative. Sante did a brilliant job of translating it into English." -"CHOICE"

"[D]eliciously tart and brilliantly compacted micro-vignettes of daily life in all its ironies, passions and dark mysteries." --Sukhdev Sandhu

"These fillers, or "fait divers," ...recount all manner of assault, graft, accident, labor strife, and murder in spare, factually tidy detail...These epigrammatic plots invite being read aloud, as well as other diversions." --"

General Fields

  • : 9781590172308
  • : New York Review of Books, Incorporated, The
  • : NYRB Classics
  • : 0.26
  • : July 2007
  • : 203mm X 126mm X 14mm
  • : United States
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Felix Feneon
  • : Paperback
  • : English
  • : 843.912
  • : 208
  • : Illustrations