Product Description

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. With great compassion and generosity, July reveals their idiosyncrasies and the odd logic and longing that govern their lives. No One Belongs Here More Than You is a stunning debut, the work of a writer with a spectacularly original and compelling voice.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8937 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
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. (May)
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From Bookmarks Magazine
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).

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
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. July's unadorned prose has a conversational tone, sounding like overheard bus conversations. The disaffected are well represented in such stories as "Something That Needs Nothing" and "The Swim Team," but July is at her best when she takes it a step further. The merely marginal individual borders on the grotesque in "Majesty," about a middle-aged woman's strange obsession with Prince William, and in "Mon Plaisir," with its odd and strangely removed discussion of a couple's odd sexuality. However, the most powerful piece in the collection, "This Person," is told by an unseen narrator. "Someone" gets--and rejects--"her one chance to be loved by everyone," and the story of this opportunity and how it is dismissed is told in a detached, dreamlike narrative. Debi Lewis
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

YOU ROCK MIRANDA JULY!!!!
Hello,
I only heard about Miranda July when I was in a favorite neighborhood bookstore--Pegasus books--in Berkeley. I read through some of the book and then rented the movie...I loved it. I think it is great that Ms. July puts herself out there as an artist, by doing the footwork and being proactive in getting her name known. I don't think she is smug or arrogant as one reviewer said, but that is just one person's opinion, right. I love short stories and I especially like short stories that are not the same mainstream, typical stories.

I think it is great that Ms. July was and is published in great magazines, as any great writer should be, when they now what they are doing and she is a true artist in her work.

Thanks for you work, love it.

The only thing I liked about this book is the cover art.
I picked this book up on a trip overseas, made it through three of the short stories, and then slipped it in the seat pocket in front of me, never intending to touch it again. If you'd like to read something that makes you want to slit your wrists, this is the book. The writing is fine, but the characters and stories are disturbing and annoying and not in any way relatable. I'm all for escapism, but this is just grim and pointless. Do. Not. Bother.

after a couple stories
at first you arent quite sure what to make of these desperate characters. but then i personally began to understand how i and everyone else relates to them in some sort of way. the first couple of stories start the book off a little slow, but maybe its best that way because the finale seemed to be quite nice and left me wanting more books by this young lady.

i also was not head over heels for the movie, i did like it, but not head over heels. so even if the movie wasnt tops for you, consider reading this book.