No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories | Miranda July

No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories | Miranda July | I'M JEALOUS

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No One Belongs Her...

	No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories Miranda July Scribner, 2008 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 48 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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.

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Desperately delightful.

July's short fiction is bubbling over with desperate ecstasy - sometimes shocking (and shockingly mundane), each piece taps into the lonely core at the center of each of us. Although the charge that most of her characters are similar is true, this is hardly a negative; it is the product of her touching upon the raw spirit of the human condition. Her voice is simultaneously distinct and familiar - with her short fiction, as with her film and other works, the extraordinary becomes commonplace, and the daily minutiae becomes miraculous.

I'M JEALOUS

But instead of hating Miranda July because I am jealous of her, I'm going to love her. Well, not love HER, I don't even know her . . . but love the idea of her. Love the fact that she's alive and she wrote these stories (even though I wish I had written them!) I've loved her before: I bought all the copies of Learning to Love You More in a bookstore and gave them out as presents. But making a book like that isn't something I've ever want to do, so I just loved it without a hint of envy. But this book is fiction, and it's fabulous, and inventive. The characters are so pure and raw they're almost skinless. They do and say and act out on the swirling, mess of lunacy that resides in everyone's mind. I don't want to say too much about each story because the greatness in all these stories is that what the reader knows in the end is so much more illuminated and full than what she knows in the beginning. There are moments in the book where I actually, audibly , gasped. Put my hand to my mouth and gasped. Like at a moment near the end of the story about Prince William. My gasp had nothing to do with His Royal Highness. This book is full of moments like that--they are all magical in a way, everything that great writing is supposed to be.

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like stepping into the head of someone you thought you would never meet but always wanted to

I absolutely loved this book! The characters are vivid and real and sad and funny and dirty and depressed and erotic and rotten and beautiful....
I found myself laughing and crying, sometimes while on the same page. I so needed to read a book like this...it tells it like it is, all tangled up and messy. Miranda July has a way of slipping dark secrets into the stories that simply just sit there and stare you in the face. The sometimes disturbing realities of the characters or the purely bizarre human events that occur are maginfied and yet made to seem so normal. I don't think I would want to be a character in one of these stories but I am quite sure that everyone around me is...or vice versa. What a strange and marvelous book!

p.s. I simply can't get the image of the woman in the tattered robe driving past the main character in Majesty screaming for "Potato" with the windows shut. Or, the line "One woman still had the napkin on her head, possibly asleep." in It was Romance. I could go on and on...

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You belong here, too.

Each story is a sensitive portrayal of a lonely life. The narrators all come from the same, alienated place. They are odd, and in their oddness, sympathetic.

Beneath the sad surface, there is a note of optimism in every piece. Some of the characters try to reach out to others and fail, spectacularly so, but at least they try.

Strong pieces include "The Swimming Lesson" and "I Kiss a Door."

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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