No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories

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I cannot agree with reviewers who found July's stories 'laugh out loud funny'; I am actually kind of horrified by the thought of someone laughing at the plights of her painfully unhappy protagonists. With great compassion and generosity, July reveals her characters' idiosyncrasies and the odd logic and longing that govern their lives.

I'll try a few more of these, but so far I'm surprised by how draggy the ones I've tried seem to me -- not like fun drag-queen draggy, just a drag kind of draggy. What makes this a terrible collection to my sensibility is the lack of love for her characters and especially the narrators. that said i'm not here to bash the book of stories, i only got through three of them and that was enough for me.You can read most short stories without thinking about who wrote them, and usually if they're good they're distinct from the other short stories standing around them. July’s characters are managing, barely, to pull themselves from the brink of their ordinary lives, telling themselves constantly that they could’ve done better, but settling for this in the meantime – even if ‘this’ is, simply, as good as it’s gonna get. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. I was the kind of kid who failed school -not because I was stupid, but because I needed to focus, come back down to earth, stop daydreaming.

About two thirds of the way through though, I did start to feel that although the characters changed, some male, some female, it was always the voice of Miranda July that dominated. While I can't deny that I liked some of these stories more than others, I can attest that every entry in this award-winning collection is of the same level of quality work.July is near perfect here, writing with empathy and sweetness and drawing humor from the itchily uncomfortable. 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.

I really loved her movie, and I remember liking her performance stuff back in Portland, during those so long-ago, simpler times. But I guess I wasn't weirded out so much as to turn me off the idea of reading her short story collection. Because if you read more than three stories in a row, you start to get this very odd sensation that you will be alone and unhappy for the rest of your life, and it is not pleasant.I adored the narrative voice and character perspectives in many of the stories and the dialogues are superb envy enducing. She then sent the cassette to the participants, and to subscribers to the series, and offered them for sale to others interested.

July’s collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and has been published in 23 countries. One character admits she dreams of Prince William nuzzling his face in her buns; another tries to seduce the young son of the Vietnamese owner of a beauty salon. The best of her stories adds a depth of emotional truth which can persuade you to believe in her most oddball worlds.July's quicksilver fiction is always surprising, and it takes pains to remind us that, somehow, we all belong somewhere.