No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories

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In ‘This Person’ a woman discovers her life has been just a rehearsal when she finds ‘a long rambling phone message in which every person this person has ever known is talking on a speakerphone and they are all saying, You have passed the test, it was all just a test. Some of the stories ("Something That Needs Nothing," "Birthmark," "Mon Plaisir") in this collection are fabulously weird and lovely and offbeat -- and they take you to surprising emotional places. We also use them to help detect unauthorized access or activity that violate our terms of service, as well as to analyze site traffic and performance for our own site improvement efforts.

Not sharp like "clever" or whatever, but sharp like sharp, like a knife or thorns or something that actually cuts you.

You're saying: this moment is important enough to be recorded exactly, in sight and sound, for posterity.

this is because i hate when people have only read like the first 100 pgs of like "gravity's rainbow" or "infinite jest" and because they have taken all of the 2 hours it takes to read that they think it qualifies them to then pass judgement on the whole book which took me a good forty hours to read, and that i loved. She wanders in and out of her thoughts and ponders her deepest fears she lives through in her dreams: “This pain, this dying, this is just normal. Her protagonists’ most common ailment is a symptom of celebrity magazine culture – especially rampant in her home town of Los Angeles – in which they come to believe that life always could, indeed should, be more glamorous than it is. Miranda grew up in Berkeley, California, where she first began writing plays and staging them at the all-ages club 924 Gilman. July’s short fiction is quirky and self-consciously postmodern in style … The best of her stories adds a depth of emotional truth which can persuade you to believe in her most oddball worlds.Not a bad writing style - a bit dry for my tastes, but perfectly serviceable - but Oh God the content.

These stories are marked by an imagination that conjures the incredible, renders it mundane (often through sex) and captures an emptiness of modern spirit. They hold this person's hand and tell this person how hard it was to pretend to get mad and drive off and never come back.July's characters are orphans and runaways and misfits, insecure, lost and lonely, but they do their best to find that last remaining scintilla of strength in each other and in themselves. There is much dark humour and I was initially greatly entertained and at times moved by the quirks, neuroses and peculiarities of her people. One of my favourite collections of short stories, this is the perfect showcase for Miranda July's perceptiveness and obvious fondness for people's quirks. They crumbled to pieces as I read them, and I felt like a toddler who tears a butterfly's wings off because he doesn't know that you don't play with beauty that way. One that really touched me was a scene in which a couple who were movie extras, acted more intimately on set than they ever did in their real lives.