James Franco is an acclaimed actor, director, artist, and writer. His film appearances include 127 Hours, Milk, Pineapple Express, Oz the Great and Powerful, Spring Breakers, and the Spider-Man trilogy. Franco has written and directed several films, and his visual art has been featured in solo shows in Los Angeles and New York. His writing has appeared in Esquire, The Wall Street Journal, McSweeney's, and other publications. Franco has an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College.
"[Franco] makes the difficult appear simple, which only a good
writer can do."--Booklist
"Compelling and gutsy."--Meghan O'Grady, Vogue
"Franco's stories are impressive: crisp, spare, depressing.... A
collection of beautifully written stories."--Kirkus, starred
review
"Franco's talent is unmistakable, his ambition profound. He has
taken the twin subjects of suburban Palo Alto and American
adolescence and made them as scary and true as they must be. This
is a book to be inhaled more than once, with delight and
admiration, with unease and pure enjoyment. As a writer, he's here
to stay."--Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan and Super Sad
True Love Story
"James Franco is a writer of skill and sensitivity whose depiction
of cruelty and neglect, of amusement and loneliness, of longing and
being lost--of the pains and chaos of adolescence--is original and
impressive. He manages to depict the numbingly stupid and dangerous
behavior of teenagers and make it amazingly amusing then suddenly
deeply sad."--Susan Minot, author of Rapture
"James Franco's chilling stories seem too true for comfort. The
characters in Palo Alto navigate off a moral compass so smashed
they bruise everything they touch. Franco's intense artistry swarms
all over this gripping book. Think Bret Easton Ellis, Dennis
Cooper, Kathy Acker. Or better yet, just think James Franco."--Ben
Marcus, author of Notable American Women
"James Franco's stories are raw, unsettling and delectable. Each
articulates a very American yearning within a dystopic suburban
landscape of shifting sexuality, class and race. They are both
really scary and fun to read."--Darcey Steinke, author of Easter
Everywhere
"James Franco's California teenagers are too old for camp, but not
too young for guns (a boy riding his bike to pick up a gun says, 'I
rode fast and the air on my face was like riding through cold
ghosts'). The casual cruelty of children escalates as kids strike
out against everything that is more powerful than they are. It's
the harsh humor that surprises in these stories--that and the
observations that show James Franco to be an original and simpatico
voice finely tuned to the territory. These quotable, unsettling
stories stay with you; they seem to change the ions in a
room."--Amy Hempel
"Rigorously unsentimental and fabulously dark."--Michael
Cunningham
"Spare and riveting... Franco's ear for juvenile vernacular is like
an Ouija board summoning the lost voices of Generation Z."--O, the
Oprah Magazine
"The stories are raw and funny-sad, and they capture with perfect
pitch the impossible exhilaration, the inevitable downbeat-ness,
and the pure confusion of being an adolescent."--Elle
"These rough messages torn from the notebook of angry youth just
make us want to ask James Franco to say it ain't so. These angular
stories read like dispatches from the edge of civilization: all the
young people hurting and denying it, denying connection, denying
their hope for anything but tonight, the next thing. James Franco
does not blink as he offers us these stories -- and it is hard for
us to look away."--Ron Carlson, author of The Signal
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