How I Became a Famous Novelist - Softcover

How I Became a Famous Novelist Presents a blistering evisceration of celebrity culture and literary fame. In this book, a roguish loser sets out to write the best-sellingest best seller of all time. It is the winner of the 2010 Thurber Prize for American Humor. Full description

Brilliant... How I Became a Famous Novelist is a cheeky book and a brave one, all but naming real-life literary emperors sans clothes... I was sold and sold again... [by Hely's] subtle zingers... The cynicism is delicious, the humor never broad, with just enough modesty and conscience seeping into the story to make our con artist lovable... I may have read a funnier book in the last twenty years, but at this moment I'm hard-pressed to name it. (Elinor Lipman Washington Post)

A gleeful skewering of the publishing industry and every cliché of the writing life. (New York Times Book Review)

A hilarious send-up of literary pretensions and celebrity culture. (USA Today)

Steve Hely needed to know how to write very well in order to write as miserably as he does in How I Became a Famous Novelist. In a satirical novel that is a gag-packed assault on fictitious best-selling fiction, Mr. Hely... takes aim at genre after genre and manages to savage them all. Without really straining credulity, [his] travels through the world of publishing become exuberantly farflung. Mr. Hely has deftly clobbered the popular-book business, [taking] aim at lucrative 'tidy candy-packaged novels you wrapped up and gave as presents,' the kinds of books that go 'from store shelves to home shelves to used-book sales unread.' His complaints about such books are very funny. They'd be even funnier if they weren't true. (New York Times)

How I Became a Famous Novelist has a laugh-out-loud quotient inappropriately high for reading in public. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

Hely's story offers a pitch-perfect takeoff on the insipid conventions of the best-seller racks and combines the expected caustic wit with an unexpected depth of emotional insight. (Austin American-Statesman)

I doubt I'll read a funnier book this year. (Scotland on Sunday)

Clever. (TheBookbag.co.uk)

I found myself almost crying with laughter. Should be read by anyone with a passing interest in the state of modern literature. (Independent on Sunday)

Wincingly funny. (Daily Mail)