Haiku Journalism

I'll send an hour-long recording of Dan Barry addressing the Times Herald-Record last year to the first person who pulls off something like this (thanks, Craig): Scraps of news on throwaway newsprint, written by an obscure French figure from the previous century — you'd think you could safely consign these to the literary trash heap. But what if they happen to be marvelous, mocking scraps, written with style and concision? "They're leaving, those Laotian dancers who graced the fair at Marseille; they're leaving today aboard the Polynésien." Or this beauty of an epitaph: "There is no longer a God even for drunkards. Kersilie, of St.-Germain, who had mistaken the window for the door, is dead."

The wry, zinging voice of one Félix Fénéon would leap out of any form, even news bulletins. In "Novels in Three Lines," Luc Sante has translated more than a thousand of these miniature dispatches, which run in French newspapers grouped under the rubric faits divers. Not quite fillers, faits divers resemble the squibs that USA Today publishes under the name of each state, for people who are stuck on runways without a book: quick word snapshots of news from the provinces; other people's (usually) bad news, served on hors d'oeuvre picks. In Fénéon's hands, early-20th-century France appears as a slide show, flashing scenes both homely and bizarre. "Lit by her son, 5, a signal flare burst under the skirts of Mme. Roger, of Clichy; damages were considerable."