One More Thing
By B. J. Novak. Knopf, 288 pp, hardcover

B. J. Novak is best known as an actor, writer, director, and producer on The Office, a show beloved for its sweetly awkward humour and deadpan dialogue. But like many a screen celebrity these days (see: James Franco, Ethan Hawke), Novak has decided to bring his talents to literature. Who could blame publishers for welcoming him (and them) with open arms? The Office luminary, Inglourious Basterds star, and Mindy Kaling’s sometime boyfriend, Novak is going to move more copies than some unknown schmuck who does nothing other than write.

Novak’s literary debut, One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories, is a collection of, well, stories, though by a pretty flexible definition. The shortest is two sentences long, and many are a scant page or two. The subject matter is usually ironic, moral, and unabashedly sentimental, leaving many chapters somewhere between Someecards and Aesop’s fables: funny little missives for readers who don’t really like to read. (TL;DR: you’ll probably like this book.) For those who do like reading, Novak’s stories are like lingering over a bowl of Skittles before dinner: sweet, colourful, but not really a main course. There are some exceptions, such as “Kellogg’s”, the story of a boy who finds his real father through a prize in a box of cereal, and “Sophia”, the Her-esque story of a man whose sex robot falls in love with him, both of which clock in at close to 20 pages. Even in these cases, Novak can’t resist going for a punch-line ending.

Where Novak really shines is with dialogue, and this stuff almost goes to waste on the printed page. It’s revealing, then, that in the acknowledgments at the book’s end, he remarks that he developed these stories through live public readings, which is the sort of context where a story like “The Walk to School on the Day After Labor Day” (full text: “I was sad that summer was over. But I was happy that it was over for my enemies, too.”) would come off less like a glorified tweet and more akin to witty standup in the vein of Demetri Martin. But despite their slightness, Novak’s stories are undeniably clever and often amusing: small delights to distract on your morning commute to the office.