No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories

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As a result, you can almost hear July speaking through her characters, a sort of series of monologues. Miranda July would have loved the strange, poignant appearance of an aardvark in the hourly BBC news reports; it was at the same time very funny and intensely sad. If there’s a shortcoming here, it’s that the empathy the reader feels for the characters soon gives way to annoyance at their remorseless narcissism. The style of prose and punctuation is sometimes sparse, often colloquial and seemingly casual in its execution, yet somehow each word gives the impression of having been carefully curated; the effect is that these short stories drip with poignancy and quirkiness. I think of July as primarily a performance artist, and this book is to performance art as a regular book of short stories is to a painting hanging on a gallery wall.

My favorite was "Something That Needs Nothing," which I'm pretty sure didn't explicitly say it took place in Portland, but for me it was so obviously taking place in Portland, and it just seemed so real and good, and really about what it's like to be that age and dealing with people and the world in these super intense painful ways. The first couple of stories were not my thing, it kind of reminded me of Wes Anderson films - there's some kind of nothing story going on that doesn't mean anything or change anything, but it is presented in a very flowery way. No matter how many hipsters are crushing hard on you and your cute little curls, you can't do everything.The best of her stories adds a depth of emotional truth which can persuade you to believe in her most oddball worlds.

Loneliness, insecurity and ineptitude are the prominent features of adulthood here, and (healing or edifying or relief-giving) encounters that allow the narrators to offer care or fellowship to a child emphasise a contrast with their interactions with 'normal' people who treat them with varying degrees of disdain and disinterest. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. And it takes genius - nothing added, nothing taken away genius - to pull this off in the space of a single paragraph, again and again and again. One woman teaches the elderly inhabitants of her small town to swim by having them crawl across her apartment floor, their faces submerged in bowls of water. 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.

Fans of Lorrie Moore should rub this book all over themselves - she's got that perfect balance of humor and pathos. 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. The creator and star of Me and You and Everyone We Know presents a collection of short works featuring profoundly sympathetic protagonists whose inherent sensitivities render them particularly vulnerable to unexpected events. She created her next major full-length performance piece, The Swan Tool, in 2000, also in collaboration with Love, with digital production work by Mitsu Hadeishi.

She designed Eleven Heavy Things , an interactive sculpture garden, for the 2009 Venice Biennale, and in 2013 more than a hundred thousand people subscribed to her e-mail based artwork We Think Alone . Intimate, original and more than a little strange, these are tales about people who are baffled and often overwhelmed by life.

July's language stutters and chokes as each internal monologue unfolds its ugly revelations, almost as if recoiling in disgust. 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 usually has some weird sex story to tell us (one story, where a woman in her forties recounts her sexual fantasies about Prince William, haunts me still), and she is alone and unhappy, and is guaranteed to stay that way for the rest of her life. It is an old habit, and even if everything is going to be terrific from now on, this person still wants mail. She wrote, directed and starred in The Future and Me and You and Everyone We Know, which won the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a Special Jury Prize at Sundance.