Novels in Three Lines

Félix Fénéon spent part of the year 1906 writing unsigned news briefs for the French newspaper Le Matin. More than a thousand of these have now been translated and published by The New York Review of Books Classics as Novels in Three Lines. A selection—

Some drinkers in Houilles were passing around a pistol they thought was unloaded. Lagrange pulled the trigger. He did not get up.

Seamstress Adolphine Julien, 35, threw acid in the face of her runaway lover, Barthuel, a student. Two passersby were splashed.

Four times in one week farm servant Marie Choland set her employer's farm on fire. Now she can burn down Montluçon prison.

On the bowling lawn a stroke leveled M. André, 75, of Levallois. While his ball was still rolling he was no more.

With a cheese knife, Coste, from the suburbs of Marseilles, killed his sister who, also a grocer, was his competition.

Swimming teacher Renard, whose pupils porpoised in the Marne at Charenton, got into the water himself; he drowned.