A reader writes:
Teju Cole's tweets remind me a lot of Felix Feneon's "Novels in Three Lines". His three-line crime and accident reports appeared in Le Matin in 1906. Some samples, in Luc Sante's translation:
Pauline Rivera, 20, repeatedly stabbed, with a hatpin, the face of the inconstant Luthier, a dishwasher of Chatou, who had underestimated her.
At the station in Macon, Mouroux Mouroux had his legs severed by an engine. 'Look at my feet on the tracks!" he cried, then fainted.
Catherine Rosello of Toulon, mother of four, got out of the way of a freight train. She was then run over by a passenger train.
Feneon was, among other things, a tweeter avant la lettre.
Another reader serves up more from the collection:
Again and again Mme Couderc, of Saint-Ouen, was prevented from hanging herself from her window bolt. Exasperated, she fled across the fields.
A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frerotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.
Finding his daughter, 19, insufficiently austere, Jallat, watchmaker of Saint-Etienne, killed her. It is true that he has eleven children left.
Another:
There is no longer a God even for drunkards. Kersilie, of St.-Germain, who had mistaken the window for the door, is dead.
Lit by her son, 5, a signal flare burst under the skirts of Mme. Roger, of Clichy; damages were considerable.
On the bowling lawn a stroke leveled M. André, 75, of Levallois. While his ball was still rolling he was no more.
In Oyonnax, Mlle. Cottet, 18, threw acid in the face of M. Besnard, 25. Love, obviously.
The Dish 