No One Belongs Here More Than You
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Winner, Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.
Award-winning filmmaker and performing artist Miranda July brings her extraordinary talents to the page in this startling, beguiling 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 compassion and humour, she reveals their idiosyncrasies and the odd logic and longing that govern their lives.
No One Belongs Here More Than You is a stunning debut, blisteringly good-the work of a writer with a spectacularly original and compelling voice.
'These stories are incredibly charming, beautifully written, frequently laugh-out-loud funny…profound. Miranda July is a very real writer, and has one of the most original voices to appear in fiction in many years…There has been no more enjoyable and promising a debut collection in many a moon.' Dave Eggers
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.
