Trailer Park Tuesday: One More Thing by B. J. Novak

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.

HuffPo called it "the most hilarious book trailer ever."  I don't know if I'd go quite that far...but the faux French New Wave treatment for B. J. Novak's One More Thing is good enough to draw out a chuckle (or two or three) from moi at 5 a.m. on a Tuesday in the dark dead of winter.  Novak, aka Ryan the temp on The Office (as well as the show's occasional writer, director and producer), enlists the help of fellow Office mate Mindy Kaling in a short comedic sketch full of existentialism, ambition, romantic longing, Sartre and cigarette smoke.  You've gotta admire comedy that can drop references to Ecclesiastes and Rhianna in the space of two minutes.  Novak's collection of short stories (some of them extremely short, page-long vignettes) has been getting a big publicity push and I'm naturally wary and slightly allergic to this kind of hoopla surrounding the publication of celeb-lit like this.  However, Novak won me over with his smart wit in stories published in The New Yorker (about the man who invented the calendar) and One Story (about the man who wrote the "two trains" math problem)....so I'll happily read One More Thing (subtitle: "Stories and Other Stories").  Besides, we could all use a chuckle/laugh/guffaw in the bleak midwinter, don't we?