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Eine Gruppe Teenager experimentiert in Palo Alto mit Lastern und Untugenden aller Art. Ihre Tage sind geprägt von Auseinandersetzungen, mit ihren Familien und untereinander. Sie sind selbstzerstörerisch, herzlos und nihilistisch. Verstörendes, eindrucksvolles und mitfühlendes Porträt der Grauzonen des Erwachsenwerdens einer Generation, ein Blick in die raue Welt der Jugend.

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From acclaimed Hollywood actor/director James Franco comes Palo Alto, a stunning work of fiction - the coming-of-age of a whole generation. Now a major motion picture.

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Palo Alto is the debut of a powerful new literary voice. Written with an immediacy and sense of place Palo Alto traces the lives of an extended group of teenagers as they experiment with vices of all kinds, struggle with their families and one another, and succumb to self-destructive, often heartless nihilism. Franco presents his characters in all their raw humanity, while at the same time providing insight into the teenage mind.

In the classic American tradition of story-cycles such as Sherwood Anderson´s Winesburg, Ohio, Palo Alto presents a stark, vivid, disturbing, but, above all, compassionate portrait of lives on the rough fringes of youth.

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James Franco grew up in the northern California town of Palo Alto. He is an actor, director, screenwriter and artist. His film appearances include Milk, Pineapple Express, the Spider-Man trilogy, Howl, Oz the Great and Powerful, Spring Breakers, and This Is The End.
He received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor for his performance in 127 Hours.

On television, he starred in the critically acclaimed series Freaks and Geeks and won the Golden Globe award for his portrayal of James Dean in the bio-pic of the actor´s life.

He has written and directed the films, The Broken Tower and an adaptation of Faulkner´s As I Lay Dying.

Franco has presented his visual art at galleries in America and Europe, including Psycho Nacirema at London´s Pace Gallery.

His writing has appeared in Esquire, the Wall Street Journal and McSweeney´s. He has an MFA from Brooklyn College and has studied in the creative writing MFA programme at Columbia and the film MFA programme at New York University. and is completing a PHD at Yale University.

His collection of stories, Palo Alto, was published in 2011, and his novel, Actors Anonymous in 2013.

As an actor James Franco won the Golden Globe award for his portrayal of James Dean in a tv bio-pic of the actor´s life and has appeared in such diverse films as Pineapple Express and Milk; he plays the lead in Danny Boyle´s new film 127 Hours and portrays Allen Ginsburg in Howl; he has collaborated with an artist called Carter in a conceptual film piece and has shown his work at the Dietch Projects in New York; over the course of the last two years he has been awarded degrees in English Literature from UCLA, in Creative Writing from Columbia, in Film-making from NYU and has been accepted in the English Literature PhD program at Yale.

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