Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon

Taking strange words and trusty pen in hand, Joanna Neborsky has made a splendid book of killer drawings and fluid design. Excelsior! Maria Kalman Felix Feneonanarchist, art maven, literary instigatoredited Rimbauds Illuminations and was the first to publish James Joyce in French. He was also the author of 1,220 faits-divers that appeared over the course of 1906 in the Paris newspaper Le Matin. As stand-alone pieces, these concise, and often bizarre, three-line reports of death, naval exercises gone awry, petty theft and labor disputes are enigmatic fragments, but when viewed as a whole they form a mosaic of that era in France. The New York Review of Books published Luc Santes English translation of these items as Novels in Three Lines, inspiring artist Joanna Neborsky to create illustrations and collages that vivify a selection of these trenchant vignettes. After studying literature at Yale, teaching English in Toulouse, playing drums in a Ronettes tribute band, leading tours in New York Harbor as a park ranger and living on a horse farm outside Los Angeles, Joanna Neborsky decided all she really wanted to do was draw. She applied to New Yorks School of Visual Arts MFA Illustration program in 2007 and two years later she had self-published four books and delivered the commencement address at Radio City Music Hall. Her work has been recognized in American Illustration and 3x3 Magazine. Her clients include Riverhead Books, Farrar Straus & Giroux, and Gensler, a global architecture firm.