feuilleton

Before Roth found success as a novelist, he established himself as one of Europe’s leading writers of the feuilleton, a form that originated as a “talk of the town” newspaper supplement in 19th-century France.

From the earliest days of The New Yorker—indeed, from its very first issue, which was dated February 21, 1925—the magazine’s reportage, criticism, and feuilleton have been paired with cartoons.

In 1969, Perec told his editor Maurice Nadeau that he was planning an adventure novel which was to appear serially, feuilleton style, as the stories of Jules Verne had.

The words appear to have increased in difficulty over time — therapy, initials and dulcimer in the 1940s compared to appoggiatura, guetapens and feuilleton in the last decade — but the contestants’ expressions of puzzlement, exasperation and triumph are timeless.

But they do not leech news and pass it off as their own; by directing readers to a Boston Globe essay about the Freedom Summer, or Bertrand Russell’s feuilleton in Harper’s celebrating idleness, they collect and highlight, instead of scrambling and reselling.