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.