October 22, 2010

My review of James Franco in Sunday's NY Times

The wonderful people over at the New York Times Book Review asked me to weigh in on James Franco's first collection of stories, "Palo Alto." The whole review is here and will be in Sunday's print edition.  But a snippet for those of you who are into the whole snippet-thingie (and we seem to be a country of snippets, sound bytes, and tweets):

Too often, our comfort zones are our tombstones. We settle into numbing patterns and that’s that — wake me when it’s over. Not so in the frenetic world of James Franco, whose ambition over the past few years has manifested almost as performance art: he’s been affiliated with multiple M.F.A. programs, in fiction, poetry and filmmaking; he’s angling to add “Dr.” to his name, having recently become a Ph.D. aspirant at some shabby school called Yale. Oh, and in case your particular comfort zone is a cave: he’s a pretty successful actor, too.

Congratulations to Franco for the publication of his first book!