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ONE MORE THING: STORIES AND OTHER STORIES
Author:
Novak, B. J.
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Class:
Fiction
Age: Adult
Language: English
Descriptors: Short Stories
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LC: PS3614.O
Print Run: 150000
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ISBN-13: 9780385351836
LCCN: 2013044121
Imprint: Knopf
Publisher: Random House
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Pub Date: 02/04/2014
Availability: Available
List: $26.00
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Hardcover
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Physical Description:
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276 pages ; 22 cm
H 8.52",
W 5.95",
D 1.18",
0.98 lbs.
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LC Series:
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Brodart Sources:
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Brodart's Insight Catalog: Adult
Brodart's TOP Adult Titles
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Bibliographies:
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Los Angeles Times Bestsellers List
New York Times Bestsellers List
New York Times Bestsellers: Adult Fiction
Publishers Weekly Bestsellers
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Awards:
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Booklist Starred Reviews
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Starred Reviews:
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Booklist
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TIPS Subjects:
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General Fiction
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BISAC Subjects: |
FICTION / Short Stories (single author)
FICTION / Humorous / General
FICTION / Satire
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LC Subjects:
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FICTION / Literary
FICTION / Short Stories (single author)
HUMOR / General
Humorous stories
Short stories
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SEARS Subjects: |
Humorous fiction
Short stories
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Reading Programs: |
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| Annotations |
| Brodart's TOP Adult Titles | 10/01/2013 |
| Where else can you learn a valuable lesson from a Frosted Flakes prize winner whose winnings are about to destroy his family? Humorous and insightful stories run the gamut of themes in a fiction collection that features John Grisham's response to a major typo and a school principal bent on erasing arithmetic from the curriculum. 288pp., 150K, Auth res: Los Angeles, CA, Tour |
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| Starred Reviews: |
| Booklist | 01/01/2014 |
| Novak's high-concept, hilarious, and disarmingly commiserative fiction debut stems from his stand-up performances and his Emmy Award-winning work on the comedy series, The Office, as writer, actor, director, and executive producer. Accordingly, his more concise stories come across as brainy comedy bits, while his sustained tales covertly encompass deep emotional and psychological dimensions. An adept zeitgeist miner, Novak excels at topsy-turvy improvisations on a dizzying array of subjects, from Aesop's fables to tabloid Elvis to our oracular enthrallment to the stock market. A master of cringe, Novak imagines a blind date with a warlord, a Comedy Central TV roast of Nelson Mandela, and a mortifying misunderstanding between mega-best-selling novelist John Grisham and his new editor. Writing with zing and humor in the spirit of Woody Allen and Steve Martin, Novak also ventures into the realm of George Saunders and David Foster Wallace. A boy wins a breakfast-cereal contest and discovers a shocking family secret. A sex robot falls in love. A man reveals the heartbreak behind the universally dreaded math problem about the two trains leaving the stations at different times. Baseline clever and fresh, at best spectacularly perceptive, and always commanding, Novak's ingeniously ambushing stories of longing, fear, pretension, and confusion reveal the quintessential absurdities and transcendent beauty of our catch-as-catch-can lives. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Novak's television fame is an instant lure, one that will be pitched far and wide as Novak appears on major talk shows and travels to 20 cities in concert with an immense print and online ad campaign. Seaman, Donna. 270p. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2014. |
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| Journal Reviews |
| BookPage | 04/01/2014 |
| If you are tempted to dismiss former star of "The Office" B.J. Novak's collection One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories as a celebrity vanity project, think again. Novak, a Harvard graduate with a degree in English and Spanish literature, is the real thing. With his brand of sharp, absurdist, observational humor, it's easy to see him taking his place in The New Yorker's "Shouts & Murmurs" column alongside stalwarts like Woody Allen and newcomers like his fellow actor Jesse Eisenberg. Novak's collection comprises 64 pieces, ranging from the two lines of "Kindness Among Cakes" to 20 pages, so if you encounter one offering that isn't appealing, you generally don't have to wait long before he delivers one that scores. Immersed as he is in pop culture, Novak finds it a ready-made source of material, as in "Walking on Eggshells (or: When I Loved Tony Robbins)" where the narrator turns her pursuit of the self-help guru into a self-help project. Celebrities like Kate Moss, Neil Patrick Harris, Johnny Depp and Elvis Presley also have their moments onstage. But Novak fully displays his considerable skill in stories like "J.C. Audetat, Translator of Don Quixote," in which a poet gains fame producing a string of increasingly improbable translations of great works, or in "The Ghost of Mark Twain," where a middle school English teacher confronts an editor at Bantam Scholastic Classics with a surprising complaint about a certain deplorable word in Huckleberry Finn. While it may not be as lucrative as his work in film and television, if Novak can continue to produce writing this fresh, funny and emotionally astute, he'll have established himself firmly in a successful complementary career. Harvey Freedenberg. 288pg. BOOKPAGE, c2014. |
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| Kirkus Reviews | 01/15/2014 |
| A debut collection of stories, ranging from two or three sentences to 18 or so pages, from Novak, best known for his work on The Office. Given the sheer number of entries in this collection, it's not surprising that Novak has both hits and misses. Among the latter are a few sketches that read like stand-up material, occasionally witty but also occasionally falling flat. Some ideas work better in conception than in execution--"Walking on Eggshells (or: When I Loved Tony Robbins)," for example, in which the narrator is blunt about wanting to have sex with the eponymous motivational speaker, or "The Ghost of Mark Twain," in which a teacher objects to the language in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and hopes to see a new edition increasing the number of times Huck uses the "N-word." At other times, however, Novak is spot-on and frequently hilarious. In "The World's Biggest Ripoff," the narrator and his family visit the Baseball Hall of Fame, Niagara Falls and the Guinness World Records Museum and find all of them wanting. The narrator then visits an "incredibly well-executed interactive holographic exhibit on the Bernie Madoff hedge fund scam of 2009" and finds the $100 entrance fee (per person) well spent. The last piece in the collection, "J. C. Audetat, Translator of Don Quixote," is also the longest, so Novak has more space in which to develop his comic ideas. A translator becomes famous translating not only Miguel de Cervantes, but also Leo Tolstoy and Marcel Proust--and his final work is a new translation of The Great Gatsby into "modern" English. Novak creates a spectrum of work from the mediocre to the deliciously tongue-in-cheek. If you don't like something, just wait--a new piece is usually only a page or two away. 256pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2014. |
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| Library Journal | 01/01/2014 |
| What if real-life investigative reporter Chris Hansen (To Catch a Predator) went to a Justin Bieber concert? What if Nelson Mandela were the subject of a celebrity roast on Comedy Central? What if robots learn to love but their owners just want to keep it casual? What if the tortoise and the hare had a rematch? Writer and actor Novak (The Office; Inglourious Basterds) answers all these questions and more in his funny, engaging debut collection. Selections range from snippets of conversation to one-page modern fables to more fully realized selections, such as the touching "One of These Days." Novak is at his most adroit when examining the impact of mobile devices and social networking on our lives. We place plaintive and rambling "Missed Connections" ads when one-night stands go wrong and demand extreme forms of "Closure" when longer relationships fail. VERDICT Novak is a fresh, welcome voice in humor with wide-ranging potential. Die-hard Office fans may be attracted because of his connection, but contemporary humor aficionados and fans of David Sedaris, Woody Allen, Steve Martin, and Mindy Kaling, Novak's costar and friend, are most likely to pick this one up and should enjoy it. [See Prepub Alert, 8/26/13.]. Jennifer B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll. Northeast. 288p. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2014. |
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| Library Journal Prepub Alert | 08/26/2013 |
| He's been seen on The Office, won a Screen Actors Award for his work in Inglourious Basterds, and will appear shortly in Saving Mr. Banks with Tom Hanks. But Novak also aspires to write, and his publisher insists that he's talented, comparing him to George Saunders and signing him for a two-book deal. He's already attracted big audiences at venues nationwide and in Paris, doubtless helped along by his chops as a stand-up comic, which seem to inform his writing style: terse, Woody Allen-esque takes on the absurdities of modern life. With a 150,000-copy first printing. 256p. LJ Prepub Alert Online Review. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2013. |
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| Publishers Weekly | 11/25/2013 |
| Novak's debut contains a buckshot 64 fun and funny short stories crammed into a single volume. Part Etgar Keret, part McSweeney's, these tidy tales from the alum of TV's The Office depart from the "how I became famous" comedian's biography for a decidedly more literary turn. The collection's opening story, "The Rematch," is a clever sequel to a classic in which the hare pressures the tortoise into a rematch in an attempt to get past the most shameful defeat of his life. In another standout, "Sophia," a young man custom-orders a sex doll, but is disappointed when he discovers that it possesses artificial intelligence (the first of its kind) and the capacity to feel love. The bulk of Novak's stories are comedic, and more than a few are surprisingly tender. "A Good Problem to Have" features a confused senior citizen pushing into an elementary school classroom to explain how he invented the two-trains-leave-the-station math problem but never got credit for it. If the collection feels uneven at times, like a series of playful asides (a handful of the entries don't reach beyond a few slight lines), perhaps that's because Novak seems to have worked harder on the more substantial stories, which have the pleasing feel of being written by an author in complete control of his craft. First printing of 150,000 announced. Agent: Richard Abate, 3 Arts Entertainment. (Feb.). 270p. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, c2013. |
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9780385351836,dl.it[0].title
| Review Citations |
| New York Times Book Review | 02/23/2014 |
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