If you follow Teju Cole on Twitter, you’ve likely already read many of his small fates, tweets he composed over two years drawn from Nigerian newspapers. The project follows the spirit of Félix Fénéon’s faits divers, three-line tragedies collected from the news.
Cole has written about the project in detail at his site, as have a number of other sites, but I can’t recall seeing the small fates put together in one place before The New Inquiry published 45 today under the title I don’t normally do this sort of thing. Cole’s small fates operate on a wonderfully strange axis of comedy and horror; they are brief but rich, ironic but intensely real.
Sample:
Biblioklept 
In Ojota last night, Teju Cole, 36, underwent an extreme form of literary criticism: he was relieved of his laptop at gunpoint.
I suspect black humour is an effective way to deal with the brutality of Nigerian society. Laughing at the absurdity of horror.
LikeLike