I hate blurbs on book covers, at least put that shit on the back if it’s all you can do you think you have to to sell your shit and maybe you’re right, I’m no good at selling it. A terrible telemarketer, I would probably make a mediocre regional fertilizer salesman, which is to say I would be shitty at selling shit. So you go on building bridges and stuff. I mean I get it. It’s silly but I’m better at burning them britches. What I like is to consume my brain food from a plain colored box, like an Oreo milkshake, or expensive yogurt the way Muslims frown on figure drawing in the mosque. I think that’s rad. Frown away Mohammad. Patterns are whatever. Pyramids are when. They are good to think on I think. I like to gaze at them and think on Gawd oh gawd the stars the trees. But my kind of cover is a naked Knopf hardbound from the 60s. Maybe I’m boring and probably it’s vain but I don’t want other people’s opine opinions influencing my internal dialogue, not until I’ve digested my lunch which is to say eaten the text the film the album the thing and pooped out an opinion of some kind, however odd it might look oblong and oblique, not until I’ve had time to play with it to prod it to scrape and slice it beneath the blade of my tongue. But I like first for a thing to be in space like a rock in the ground pulsing tight 600 million miles a fucking hour going this is True btw, and then to have it there in my mouth in my ears my eyes huge like a fresh batch of fungus, a bunch of firecrackers going off in my bulb my skull my head. My favorite thing said in French is J’ai mal à la tête. To think of it rolls off the tongue like butter on bread.

That being said, do you think this Ben Marcus blurb is a backhanded compliment?

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