Author Nick Hornby, whose books High Fidelity and About a Boy have recently met with silver screen success, read from his new novel-in-progress for the first time last night as part of visiting lecturer Zadie Smith’s Writers’ Season.

Hornby moonlights as a pop music critic for The New Yorker, and his books often revolve around love, humor and music.

Reading from a novel tentatively titled Kings and Queens of Shambles, Hornby told the story of three people who meet when they’re all trying to kill themselves by jumping from the same roof.

“Out of the way, losers!” yells Jess, as she charges the other two characters already occupying the prime suicide spot.

Hornby’s novels often use humor to deal with serious issues—as he puts it, he writes “in a funny tone about sad things.”

“The comic novels I like always have some bottom,” Hornby said.

“Why is [committing suicide] the biggest sin of all?” wonders one of the characters in the selection. “I can see that it’s a sort of queue-jumping. But if you jump in a queue, people tut, they don’t say, ‘You’re going to burn in hellfire for all eternity!’”

More than a hundred students came to the reading, held in the Science Center. Afterwards, Hornby fielded questions about his writing, favorite songs and opinions on British and American literature.

“Anybody who writes fiction has ideas—most are rubbish, but every now and then you think of something that will allow you to do what you want to do,” Hornby said.

Smith is teaching a class on 20th century literature at Harvard this semester in addition to a fiction writing class.

She wrote in an e-mail that the speakers for her Writers’ Season series do not visit her classes, but they are chosen with her curriculum in mind.

“Their readings are timed so as to fit in with the theme of the class the day before; so Nick Hornby comes at a time when we are discussing the English comic novel, for example,” Smith wrote.

According to Smith, the lecture series will continue with Matthew Klam, author of Sam the Cat, and Alexander Hemon, author of Nowhere Man, which was nominated for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award this year.

The lectures, which kicked off this fall with readings by such rising literary stars as Jonathan Safran Foer and David Eggers, were “a one-time opportunity,” according to Chair of the English department Lawrence Buell.