B.J. Novak might have just reinvented the process of writing fiction, said Rachel Deahl in The Boston Globe. A year after finishing a seven-year run as an actor, writer, and director for the hit TV comedy The Office, the 33-year-old Harvard grad found he’d compiled dozens of notebooks filled with random story ideas. Instead of picking one and developing it, he pulled out 100, polished them, and began reading them aloud to audiences at comedy clubs and bookstores on both coasts. “The audiences were the best editors a person could have,” he says. “If you write something kind of boring and you read it in front of 100 people, you will feel how boring it is. You will be ashamed and embarrassed, and will never want to say those sentences again until you make them a lot more interesting.”
The book shaped by those road tests—the story collection One More Thing—has “shattered expectations,” said Alexandra Alter in The Wall Street Journal. Novak hasn’t merely been accepted in publishing; “he’s being heralded by many in the literary establishment as a major new talent.” If the writing eventually eclipses his acting career, that’s not likely to bother him. “I realized a while ago that I never once had a fantasy of a role I wanted to play,” he recently told NPR. He fantasizes instead, he says, about creating a perfect book or script. “That’s what wakes me up with a smile on my face in the middle of the night—something I want to write and then test, and then see if other people love it the way I do.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
-
'Making a police state out of the liberal university'Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
8 looming climate tipping points that imperil our planetThe Explainer New reports detail the thresholds we may be close to crossing
-
Try 6 free issues of The Week JuniorSpark your child's curiosity with The Week Junior - the award-winning current affairs magazine for 8-14s.
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”