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• I really loved this collection of short stories. Favorites included "The Sister," "Something That Needs Nothing," "Making Love in 2003, and "How to Tell Stories to Children." Ultimately, I thought the whole book was very strong though. July has an interesting insight into the subtleties of human nature and behavior that made these stories impossible to put down.

  5.00 out of 5

  cinesnail88

• A very satisfying collection of short stories. Quirky and silly, often quite touching.

  5.00 out of 5

  Heather_S

• Miranda July's funny, sad, startling collection of short stories won the Frank O'Connor in 2007. It comes with different coloured covers so that you can coordinate your copy with your clothes. I bought mine via Abebooks and got a bright green copy which clashed a bit with my wardrobe. Often bordering on the bizarre, these 16 stories of lonely misfits, injured by life, aching for love and acceptance would really hurt to read, but the characters are survivors, buffered by their rich fantasy lives.The protagonist of Shared Patio longs to write for a magazine advice column and the story is sprinkled with offbeat advice. She builds fantasies around her neighbour which she gets close to fulfilling when he has an epileptic fit on the shared patio one day.In Swim Team a woman coaches a swimming team comprising old people in her apartment and without the aid of water (although she does provide them with bowls when they need to practice breathing exercises!)A woman dreams of an erotic encounter with Prince William in Majesty and awake plots how she might meet him.In The Sister A lonely man is set up on a date with a colleague's sister who never turns up, and turns out never to have existed. Perhaps it doesn't matter in the end.It's hard to pick a favourite, but Something That Needs Nothing is a love story that broke my heart. This Person is about how we will always go on sabotaging ourselves is as perfect a short short story as they come, and you can read the whole thing here.I wonder it everyone reading the book will find themselves reflected in this book. Do you feel as lonely, as out of sync with the world, as uncertain as July's characters?It's frightening to admit, but I do sometimes. I really do! And if you say yes too, I think I will look at you oddly (as of course you will have to look at me). Maybe this is the great unsayable - we aren't as together as we'd like the world to think we are.But when you look at Miranda July, who successful, young and beautiful, everything her characters are not, you wonder how the hell she channels these voices!I feel like turning the book over and beginning it all over again. This is a collection that is staying on my writing desk to stir up my slothful own muse.

  5.00 out of 5

  bibliobibuli

• I first learnt about Miranda online through Miss Snark’s (now expired) blog where she’d put a link to Miranda’s ingenius website marketing her new book. And now that I’ve read it, I am more in awe of the lady, for Miranda is a true genius as her stories are beautifully original, quirky and a learning experience in what new writing should be all about as a wannabe writer myself. I’ve been stuck in a rut trying to write something the past few months, and the more I read, the less I seem to want to write because I feel dwarfed by the talent here in America. And yet, writers like Miranda inspire me to abandon all my inhibitions and insecurities and look within myself to want and go to a place where I can just throw away the shackles of adulthood and motherhood and perhaps even readerhood to unlock my inner muse. No One Belongs Here More Than You is a compilation of 16 stories that are really insights into seeming ordinary lives that have been turned inside out with Miranda’s imagination and use of clever prose that makes you pause after each story and go, “Hmm…what happened there?”. I am not a deep person but I do love a good philosophical, metaphysical ”why” and ”what if” pondering from time to time, and that is what each Miranda story is like. That some of the stories are disturbing in content (a man is given ecstacy and coerced to having sex with his male friend even when he’s not gay; a teacher having sex with her autistic student; a movie being made about an older man being in love with a child) is a factor that becomes less important as she delves into the imagined how of these scenarios, how easily these things happen, how commonly they take place, how loneliness does not discriminate, how even the most ordinary, traditional, ‘normal’ personas can make drastic turns in life with even the smallest decisions - taking a drug, sending an email, a mere phone call. That most of what happens in life needs no grand gestures, no build-ups, no elaborate staging. That some things just happen because they happen in our minds, and the rest of the world is left to wonder, “Why didn’t we see that coming?” because really, who do you know has the time or inclination to really look? My simplest reasons for liking Miranda is she’s funny and imaginative. Sometimes it seems that she may be a little crazy but I think those are the best kind of writers, those who seem to have a controlled madness about them they can use to come up with truly original stuff you don’t get to see very often. I await eagerly for more of Miranda’s books and her films.

  4.50 out of 5

  jennemede

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