no one belongs here more than you (paperback)
Award-winning filmmaker and performing artist Miranda July brings her extraordinary talents to the page in a startling, sexy, and tender collection. In these stories, July gives the most seemingly insignificant moments a sly potency. A benign encounter, a misunderstanding, a shy revelation can reconfigure the world. Her characters engage awkwardly — they are sometimes too remote, sometimes too intimate.
“An accomplished debut collection of 16 stories, simultaneously bizarre and achingly familiar….A smart, original collection.” Kirkus Reviews
“July’s collection of stories is a gem of unconventional storytelling. Comparisons to Lorrie Moore only get the potential reader halfway there; one must add Karen Finley’s meditations and Douglas Coupland’s painful self-exploration.” Booklist
“Some of these couplings are startling, but others are cliches that drag down an otherwise witty and unusual book. The best moments here are small…and as they accrue the collection becomes an exhilarating read.” Library Journal
“Miranda July’s is a beautiful, odd, original voice — seductive, sometimes erotic, and a little creepy, too.” David Byrne
“These stories are incredibly charming, beautifully written, frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and even, a dozen or so times, profound. Miranda July is a very real writer, and has one of the most original voices to appear in fiction in many years. Fans of Lorrie Moore should rub this book all over themselves — she’s got that perfect balance of humor and pathos. There has been no more enjoyable and promising a debut collection in many a moon.” Dave Eggers
“These delightful stories do that essential-but-rare story thing: they surprise. They skip past the quotidian, the merely real, to the essential, and do so with a spirit of tenderness and wonder that is wholly unique. They are (let me coin a phrase) July-esque, which is to say: infused with wonder at the things of the world.” George Saunders, author of In Persuasion Nation
It’s a testament to July’s artistry that the narrators of this arresting first collection elicit empathy rather than groans. “Making Love in 2003,” for example, follows a young woman’s dubious trajectory from being the passive, discarded object of her writing professor’s attentions to seducing a 14-year-old boy in the special-needs class she teaches, while another young woman enters the sex industry when her girlfriend abandons her, with a surprising effect on the relationship. July’s characters over these 16 stories get into similarly extreme situations in their quests to be loved and accepted, and often resort to their fantasy lives when the real world disappoints (which is often): the self-effacing narrator of “The Shared Patio” concocts a touching romance around her epilectic Korean neighbor; the aging single man of “The Sister” weaves an elaborate fantasy around his factory colleague Victor’s teenage sister (who doesn’t exist) to seduce someone else. July’s single emotional register is familiar from her film Me and You and Everyone We Know, but it’s a capacious one: wry, wistful, vulnerable, tough and tender, it fully accommodates moments of bleak human reversals. These stories are as immediate and distressing as confessionals.
Miranda July’s impressive accomplishments include two exhibits at the Whitney Biennial, an award-winning film (Me and You and Everyone We Know), two albums on the record label Kill Rock Stars, and now her praised collection of short stories (encouraged by her literary mentor Rick Moody). The stories, previously published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Tin House, and other literary journals, won July praise as “a strange and compelling new voice” (Seattle Times). Even those who found the collection uneven and the narrative voices of each story eerily similar admire the best ones as “funny and insightful, offering moments of utter heartbreak through deeper, more sophisticated storytelling” (New York Times Book Review).
$ 14.00
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