Aside from “Jesus wept,” the most extreme examples of short-form, high-impact storytelling I’ve seen can be found in the wonderful book Novels in Three Lines—a collection of dizzyingly artful, gemlike news reports by fin-de-siècle anarchist and literary gadfly Félix Fénéon, translated by Luc Sante. The book contains hundreds; this is one of several that have haunted me since the first read.