Actors Anonymous: A Novel - Softcover

Franco, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1477800859 ISBN 13: 9781477800850

Publisher: Little A, 2013

Synopsis

The actors in James Franco’s brilliant debut novel include a McDonald’s drive-thru operator who spends his shift trying on accents; an ex-child star recalling a massive beachside bacchanal; hospital volunteers and Midwestern transplants; a vampire flick starlet who discovers a cryptic book written by a famous actor gone AWOL; and the ghost of River Phoenix. Then there’s Franco himself, who prowls backstage, peering out between the lines—before taking the stage with fascinating meditations on his art, along with nightmarish tales of excess. “Hollywood has always been a private club,” he writes. “I open the gates. I say welcome. I say, Look inside.”

Told in a dizzying array of styles—from lyric essays and disarming testimonials to hilariously rambling text messages and ghostly footnotes—and loosely modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous’s Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, Actors Anonymous is an intense, wild ride into the dark heart of celebrity.

About this title

Review:

"Part aphorism, part instruction manual, part reflection, part short story and, seemingly, part memoir, the narrative is a pastiche of forms and moods. Franco (or his alter ego) presents his ideas through anecdotes and semiplausible fictional incidents, with plenty of inside references to Hollywood actors." —Kirkus Reviews

"Subversively funny and provocatively honest, is ostensibly about acting but it's really about a society where everyone's reduced to Actors Anonymous the roles they play. The novel's many narrators fight back against these roles in truly original, often hilarious, and deeply affecting ways. So should we all." —Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story

"A remarkable, visceral display of the projected voice. Blake’s assertion 'The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom' is used, brilliantly, as justification for Franco's life and also its misunderstood public/private undoing. The work gleams with aphoristic truths—'Maybe the search for the real is about playing the most roles and having the most sex.' 'It’s the snarky little fuckers that write for South Park or Family Guy and hide behind cartoons that get revered. They are honest, but honest about everyone else, not about themselves.' Franco, by contrast, uses his own body as the staging area for a quite ambitious and seriously self-deconstructive fiction. Real art, as here, is always a performative seduction." —David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

"Electrifying to see a writer hold nothing back!  This shape-shifting narrative extends a reader's sense of what a novel can be, can do.  Franco plays with persona in ways that implicate a reader. The defiant humor is hard-won (including the best worst job interview ever), his take on irresponsible people is both eloquent and suitably scorching, the language is enviable: the seduction of a virgin is 'like a bullet through a birthday cake.' Franco's novel lures you in with indelible images, provocative mind games, and characters laid bare, then successfully strands you in a frightening place." —Amy Hempel

"James Franco puts on a James Franco mask and borrows formats from AA to create a fiction about the fiction of identity—especially as it pertains to actors and, by logical extension, writers. Is fame (the longing for it, the actuality of it) as entangled in the creative act as alcohol? Is acting (writing) an escape from reality or the only thing that’s real for an actor (writer)? The illusion of reality and the reality of fiction hold hands in this novel in much the way that actors (and writers) steal from their lives to enliven their characters. The novel does not merely explore acting, it enacts it. This is a lively, strange, engaging, often funny, sometimes brilliant, and utterly fearless novel." —Robert Boswell, author of Tumbledown, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, & The Half-Known World

Book Description:

Actors Anonymous, from acclaimed Hollywood actor/director James Franco, is a brilliant new work of fiction.

About this edition

• Publisher: Little A
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1477800859
• ISBN 13: 9781477800850
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 306