More Praise for PALO ALTO
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. Franco has a flair for creating these stopped moments that lift a story from its specific setting into a universal place, so that particular meanings resonate out from themselves and redouble their effect.
Elle
Delightfully coarse, riffing dialogue that hones in on subjects like race and sex, love and violence Compelling and gutsy.
Vogue
Franco writes with such deep empathy and affinity that one has to wonder if he lived this life.
USA Today
Youll be able to pick out Francos influences: Raymond Carvers tight-lipped stoicism; the sun-streaked disaffection of Less Than Zero Hubert Selby Jr.s Last Exit to Brooklyn . He excels at dialogue.
Salon.com
In I Could Kill Someone especially, about a high schoolers deliberations over murdering a bully, there is an element of sympathy for the tormented narrator that makes his thought process real and frightening. Franco is a serious writer.
The Wall Street Journal
[Francos] economic construction seems so simple throughout, but the stories end up approaching profundity. These stories were not published because James Franco is a movie star but because they are good. He makes the difficult appear simple, which only a good writer can do.
Booklist
The collection exhibits a clear sense of purpose. It is, in short, literature.
New York Journal of Books
Its the harsh humor that surprises in these storiesthat 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
James Francos 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
Francos 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, hes here to stay.
Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story
James Francos chilling stories seem too true for comfort. The characters in Palo Alto navigate off a moral compass so smashed, they bruise everything they touch. Francos 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
These rough messages torn from the notebook of angry youth just make us want to ask James Franco to say it aint 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 storiesand it is hard for us to look away.
Ron Carlson, author of The Signal
James Franco is a writer of skill and sensitivity whose depiction of cruelty and neglect, of amusement and loneliness, of longing and being lostof the pains and chaos of adolescenceis 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
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First Scribner trade paperback edition June 2011
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2010032932
ISBN 978-1-4391-6314-6
ISBN 978-1-4391-6315-3 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-4391-7572-9 (ebook)
The story Jack-O first appeared in Esquire magazine in a slightly altered form.
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