No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories

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Islamic Relief is an international aid and d development charity that aims to alleviate the suffering of the world’s poorest people in more than 30 countries, mainly in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. As well as responding to disasters and emergencies, Islamic Relief promotes sustainable economic and social development by working with local communities – regardless of race, religion or gender. In its 33 – year history, Islamic Relief has helped more than 110m people across the world. Islamic Relief is one of the 13 UK charities that form the DEC (Disasters Emergency Committee).

Don't get me wrong - at our most obsessive/unrequited everyone has probably had some element of these behaviours - but you need to be chemically imbalanced in the first full rush of it all to relate - and a whole book of them is just grueling. For example, the first story, “The Shared Patio,” follows a woman who writes for the magazine Positive. The magazine is designed for people suffering from HIV. The story takes place on a patio shared between upstairs and downstairs neighbors. The narrator, the upstairs neighbor, slowly builds the confidence to start using the patio. Her fears about human nature are confirmed when her neighbors don’t live up to her expectations. Miranda July's is a beautiful, odd, original voice - seductive, sometimes erotic, and a little creepy too" (DAVID BYRNE) These stories are incredibly charming, beautifully written, frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and even, a dozen or so times, profound. Miranda July is a very real writer, and has one of the most original voices to appear in fiction in many years. Fans of Lorrie Moore should rub this book all over themselves – she's got that perfect balance of humor and pathos. There has been no more enjoyable and promising a debut collection in many a moon." —Dave Eggers

Not only is Miranda July an award-winning author, she's also an accomplished filmmaker and performer. Before discussing No One Belongs Here More Than You, watch her movie Me and You and Everyone We Know. By Miranda July with Oumarou Idrissa, commissioned for “The Future Starts Here” exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Miranda grew up in Berkeley, California, where she first began writing plays and staging them at the all-ages club 924 Gilman. She later attended UC Santa Cruz, dropping out in her sophomore year. After leaving college, she moved to Portland, Oregon and took up performance art. Her performances were successful; she has been quoted as saying she has not worked a day job since she was 23 years old.

Celia writes: “When our third little girl was born with learning disabilities my experience was of no longer fitting in, and of feeling that we didn’t belong anywhere. And this line from the story Majesty that's all about dreams: “That day I carried the dream around like a full glass of water, moving gracefully so I would not lose any of it. ” With Miu Miu’s support, July worked closely with designer Thea Lorentzen and a team of developers at the award winning Stinkdigital to create the complex, GPS-based messaging system. Half-app / half-human, Somebody twists our love of avatars and outsourcing —every relationship becomes a three-way. The antithesis of the utilitarian efficiency that tech promises, here, finally, is an app that makes us nervous, giddy, and alert to the people around us. The first sentence of the message is automatically “[Recipient’s name]? It’s me, [Sender’s Name]” — reminding the stand-in to assume the identity of the sender. The recipient always has the option of declining a delivery before it’s set in to motion, if now’s not a good time.

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In 1998, July made her first full-length multimedia performance piece, Love Diamond, in collaboration with composer Zac Love and with help from artist Jamie Isenstein; she called it a "live movie." She performed it at venues around the country, including the New York Video Festival, The Kitchen, and Yo-yo a Go-go in Olympia. 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 performed this piece in venues around the world, including the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Islamic Relief is rated 20th in the Top 500 Non – Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in the world by the Swiss – based independent media organization NGO Adviser. Are there any overarching themes that link these stories together? Did you find connections between the characters -- do they occupy similar worlds?

Who will Miranda July’s work appeal to? To borrow the name of her lovely first film, Me and You and Everyone We Know.” — Entertainment WeeklyJuly's stories startle us at every turn, sometimes by their sexual frankness, sometimes by passages of impossibly lush eloquence . . . and very often by their inventiveness" ( San Francisco Chronicle) Who will Miranda July's work appeal to? To borrow the name of her lovely first film, Me and You and Everyone We Know" ( Entertainment Weekly) From the acclaimed filmmaker, artist, and bestselling author of no one belongs here more than you, comes a spectacular debut novel that is so heartbreaking, so dirty, so tender, so funny, so Miranda July. Readers will be astonished. Sixteen short stories comprise No One Belongs Here More Than You. Common themes include loneliness, loss, and a search for meaning. The characters are often worried about finding lasting love and companionship. Throughout the collection, there is a strong emphasis on female sexuality, romantic love, and the desire to be accepted. 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. They all seem like thinly-veiled sketches of the author, wondering what it means to really love. It seems trendy to complain that, with so many new gadgets and digital landscapes designed to improve communication, no one knows how to speak to each other anymore. But July’s characters don’t just want to talk, they want to belong. And in their search for connection, they somehow manage to scratch out a place of their own.

So I can enthusiastically recommend her film Me and You and Everyone we Know, and also her novel The First Bad Man. But not these short stories. They’re just too short, and also too arch, which the dictionary defines as marked by a deliberate and often forced playfulness, irony, or impudence . In The Shared Patio, the narrator explains that telling Vincent Chang "it's not your fault" was "really the only thing I had ever wanted to say to anyone, and be told" (pg. 7). What does she mean by this? The UK’s first interfaith charity shop is run and staffed jointly by four religious charities chosen by Miranda July: Islamic Relief, Jewish charity Norwood, London Buddhist Centre and Spitalfields Crypt Trust. The proceeds will be shared equally between the four partners, all of who run their own charity shops. Items for sale are typical of those traditionally sold in charity shops – second – hand clothes, books, games, DVD’s, kitchen ware, toys ornaments and bric – a – brac. Prices are the same as in any charity shop. A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer. As a kid it altered my brain chemistry. It made life at home feel like heaven on earth. Whatever happened, I would just think of poor Dave and feel utterly grateful.Responding to the image, a visually impaired friend of Alan’s has written “as a visually impaired person an image of Jesus who is like me makes me feel accepted … I wish my visual impairment would be cured. But I am glad that Jesus embraces it.” My father’s first book, Xeebtii Geerida (1990). The complete devotion to his craft inspired me. This book was about the looming Somali civil war, and it kept him sane and gave him a way to process the collapse of everything. His focus on writing and how it helped him survive left an impression on me.