A Rich Box of Chocolates 
 Okay, I know you're going to misunderstand this, but here goes: One More Thing would be the perfect book for the bathroom. Not that it is cheap in any way, let alone dirty, and its humor is more for the mind than the belly. But the stories are the perfect length--mostly from a few lines to a few pages--to be read in a brief time. And you need some way to break your inclination to go on to another and yet another (after all, they are so short!), getting slightly less out of each than the one before, but quite unable to stop. Or, to change the metaphor, the book is like a box of chocolates, a very large box (64 stories in all), and overindulgence leads to indigestion. I have read 47 of them so far, and do mean to stop, but every time I open the book, I just turn to one of the shorter ones... Oops, 48! 
 If Novak loads his gun with birdshot and shoots, some of it is bound to hit, but there will be misses too. Surprisingly few, though. Most of the very short pieces are worth at least a chuckle: "If you love something, let it go. If you don't love something, definitely let it go. Basically, just drop everything, who cares." Yet even that gets you thinking about pop-psych cliches. Novak loves to shock, then to switch it to positive ends. So one very short story begins "We need a new Hitler," but a Hitler who would use his force of will for things like education and health-care, and hopefully wouldn't be called Hitler anyhow, "because I think people might find that distracting." Sometimes he is absurdly anarchic; one story, "Julie and the Warlord," is just that, one of those painful first-date conversations with the girl asking what the guy does, and he replies that, as a Congolese warlord, he has to bribe, kidnap, torture, rape, and kill. All in the tones of polite restaurant conversation, until the ending: "Discussion question: Do you think Julie should fuck the warlord? Why or why not?" 
 Quite a few stories use real celebrities. The artist Christo employs a focus group to design a roller-coaster. Author John Grisham obsesses about a word in his jacket-flap bio. "To Catch a Predator" host Chris Hansen worries about taking his daughter to a Justin Bieber concert. A girl tells motivational speaker Tony Robbins that she wants to sleep with him, but has to go through his prescriptive regimen in order to do so--by which time, she has acquired a stronger sense of herself, and no longer wants to. The lollapalooza of these is "The Comedy Central Roast of Nelson Mandela," but I didn't enjoy it--not because I was shocked, but because I didn't know many of the media celebrities who were the speakers. 
 Novak, now known as a television actor and writer, has a Harvard degree in English. Several of the best stories explore the nature of literature itself. In one, an editor at Bantam Classics interviews a visitor whom he assumes will make the usual request, to remove the n-word from school editions of Huckleberry Finn. But in fact the man is Mark Twain himself, returning as a ghost, and his request is quite a different one. The best story of all in the book for my money is an explicit homage to a figure who has been lurking behind much of this collection all along, Jorge Luis Borges. Even the title of "J. C. Audetat, Translator of Don Quixote" is a tip of the hat to one of Borges' most famous stories, but Novak takes the idea in the opposite direction. Instead of submerging himself totally in Cervantes' life and era, like Borges' Pierre Menard, Audetat brings him strikingly into the modern age, doing this again for other world classics in other languages, even when translation would seem to be unnecessary. Not only does Novak offer comparative samples from a standard translation and Audetat's, he gives a wide range of critical reactions to each publication, spot-on parodies of the real critics attributed. This is one story to needs to be taken out of the bathroom into the library because, though just as amusing as the others, it had an intellectual seriousness that they only hinted at. I will certainly read Novak again, but only if he applies his brilliance to subjects of greater specific gravity. I have had enough chocolates.