{"product_id":"novels-in-three-lines-isbn-9781590172308","title":"Novels in Three Lines","description":"\u003cb\u003eA NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eNovels in Three Lines\u003c\/i\u003e 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 Félix Fénéon. Dandy, anarchist, and critic of genius, the discoverer of Georges Seurat and the first French publisher of James Joyce, Fénéon carefully maintained his own anonymity, toiling for years as an obscure clerk in the French War Department. \u003ci\u003eNovels in Three Lines\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cp\u003e\"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.\" --\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In 1906, suspected terrorist, anarchist, and literary instigator Félix Fénéon wrote more than a thousand small bits for the Paris newspaper \u003ci\u003eLe Matin\u003c\/i\u003e. Each was a bizarre yet enigmatic, fragmentary, often scandalous, report.\" \u003ci\u003e—\u003c\/i\u003eSteven Heller, im\u003ci\u003ePrint\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"A Parisian anarchist, dandy and literary editor  born in 1861, Feneon was at his most eloquent when saying as little as possible.\u003ci\u003e Novels in Three Lines \u003c\/i\u003eis 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.\" --\u003ci\u003eToronto Star\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“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.” –\u003ci\u003eCHOICE\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"[D]eliciously  tart and brilliantly compacted micro-vignettes of daily life in all its ironies,  passions and dark mysteries.\" --Sukhdev Sandhu\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"These fillers, or \u003ci\u003efait divers\u003c\/i\u003e,...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.\" --\u003ci\u003eBookforum\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Layered, ironic, amused, Feneon's voice is unmistakable..a  little yo-yo of a narrative that gives pleasure no matter how many times it's flung.  The construction, the comic timing, the sly understatement that demands instant rereading.\"  --\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Today's lurid tabloid journalism has nothing on\u003cb\u003e Novel in Three  Lines\u003c\/b\u003e, originally published anonymously in the French daily Le Matin in 1906. The  man behind them was one Felix Feneon, part-time anarchist, and they reveal a delight  in the fateful cruelties of life: Random shootings, premeditated suicides, and awful  robberies were his main fixations. It's no insult to our own taste for the sensational  when we admit to finding Paris the city more fascinating than Paris the woman.\" --\u003ci\u003eNew  York Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"The Feneon , like a book of haikus entirely devoted to suicide, murder,  fatal accidents, and incestuous sex, is a creepy introduction to the shadowed brain  cavity of a Neo-Impressionist who certainly believed in  'propaganda by the deed'  and may have plotted one or more anarchist assassinations.\" \u003ci\u003e--Harper's Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Prolific writer and cultural critic Sante (\u003ci\u003eLow Life\u003c\/i\u003e) has translated half a year's  worth of concise news blurbs written in 1906 for a Paris newspaper by Fénéon, writer,  anarchist and promoter of artists like Seurat and Bonnard.\" —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“[T]he  “\u003cb\u003eNouvelles en trois lignes\u003c\/b\u003e”…were simply news items concerning accidents, quarrels,  mayhem, fires and murders, reduced to minimal length and rendered tragic-comic or  ludicrous by artful diction, euphemism, understatement and other devices.  They have  stylistic interest, contain political and social overtones, and convey a concept  of the absurdity of life.” —\u003ci\u003eFrench Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Fénéon is best known today for his early  championing of such men as Arthur Rimbaud, Francis Poictevin, and Jules Laforgue;  for the art criticism that helped establish Neo-Impressionism…; for his \u003cb\u003eNouvelles  in trois lignes\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e, \u003c\/i\u003ethe pithy and often startlingly phrased newspapers accounts of current  events that have been cited as predecessors of ‘minimal’ story writing; and for the  exhibitions and sales of contemporary paintings he organized at the Bernheim-Jeune  gallery after 1906.” —\u003ci\u003eAmerican Historical Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“As a regular journalist, Fénéon  is best remembered for his devastatingly spare \u003ci\u003eNews stories in \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eThree Lines \u003c\/b\u003efor \u003ci\u003eLe  Matin–\u003c\/i\u003ecruelly deadpan summaries of the minor dramas of the day.” —\u003ci\u003eBurlington Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“In his time, Félix Fénéon was one of the most influential critics of art and literature  in \u003ci\u003efin-de-siecle\u003c\/i\u003e Paris… He was, clearly, a man to whom history–cultural history–owes  some recognition.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review \u003c\/i\u003e(James R. Mellow)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Félix Fénéon,  editor, critic and stylist extraordinaire...the most brilliant critic of the day.”  —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e (John Russell)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“[T]he era's most influential art critic” \u003ci\u003e—The  New Statesman\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“The fastidious editor Félix Fénéon, who placed an incisive style  in the service of avant-garde interests on every front, married rhetoric and action,  art and politics. Closely associated with Symbolism, and with the Neo-Impressionism  whose theoretical and formal basis he defined in 1886, Fénéon was probably the most  important art critic of the late nineteenth century. While conscientiously clerking  at the War Office, he used his discerning eye to appreciate literary and visual subversion…”  —\u003ci\u003eThe New Republic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"[T]he greatest critic of his age\" —William Everdell author of  \u003ci\u003eThe First Moderns\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eFélix Fénéon\u003c\/b\u003e (1861-1944) was a French anarchist, editor, and art critic in Paris  during the late 1800's. Born in Turin, he moved to Paris at the age of 20 to work  for the Ministry of Defense.  He attended the Impressionist exhibition in 1886, later  coining the term \"Neo-Impressionism\" to define the movement led by Georges Seurat.    He was the first french publisher to publish James Joyce.  In 1892, the French  police searched his apartment, claiming him to be an active anarchist. That summer,  along with other intellectuals and artists, Fénéon was placed on trial, a case which  is now know as The Trial of the Thirty. Although the charges were dismissed, he was  discharged from the Ministry of Defense. Famously painted by Paul Signac, the painting  now hangs in New York's Museum of Modern Art.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eLucy Sante \u003c\/b\u003eteaches writing and the  history of photography at Bard College. Her books include\u003ci\u003e Low Life, Evidence,\u003c\/i\u003e and  \u003ci\u003eThe Factory of Facts.\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302477746405,"sku":"NP9781590172308","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781590172308.jpg?v=1767733935","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/novels-in-three-lines-isbn-9781590172308","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}