James Franco’s latest: A book of memoir, fiction, poetry and art

James Franco has more creative output in a single year than many manage in a lifetime.

Recently, when he was not too busy making a film of William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” or writing his Vice column or getting his head shaved to star in a screen adaptation of Steve Erickson’s “Zeroville” or passing his orals at Yale or posting on Instagram, he was creating “Hollywood Dreaming: Stories, Pictures and Poems” (Insight Editions, $29.99), a book that’s part fiction, part memoir, part poetry and part art.

Technically, it’s not entirely separate from Instagram. Some of those Instagram photos are here, mostly too racy for us to share. They can be found in the book, which reached shelves Tuesday.

What we can show is the combination of art and poetry and collage (see the Sean Penn tribute and more above). There are a lot of the high-key neon colors of the film “Spring Breakers,” often using the MacPaint style of Perez Hilton.

In the introduction, Franco writes, “I need other collaborators. Sometimes these collaborators are other actors, sometimes writers, sometimes directors. And most importantly, the members of the audience are the collaborators, always, because they provide the expectations that I subvert in order to create the laughter. The laughter is the sound of presumptions crashing; the laughter is the noise of me breaking from the mold .... “

This is not a book for someone hoping for a typical Hollywood memoir, or for a typical art book. “There are many different forms in this book,” Franco writes. “I would even argue that this isn’t a book, it’s a movie in words and pictures; an autobiography told as fiction by fictional versions of real people; a collage trying to be a linear reflection of a life that is collage in nature; a clear reflection in a smashed mirror -- look at the reflection, but also look at all the pretty cracks!”

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