Reviews

Novels in Three Lines

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 196 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.

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