From the acclaimed filmmaker, artist, and bestselling author of No One Belongs Here More Than You, a spectacular debut novel that is so heartbreaking, so dirty, so tender, so funny—so Miranda July—that readers will be blown away. July is brilliant, hilarious, irreverent, piercing—even cringe-inducing, powering past sexual boundaries and gender identification into the surprising galaxy of primal connection. ‘We all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before we ask someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.’ Is there a more hopeful statement about humankind? In Miranda July’s strange universe, probably not.”

Not the Fall That Kills You…: The killer in "Dumb-Hounded" jumps off a tall building to his supposed death, but he has "good brakes" that he uses to screech himself to a halt just before hitting the pavement, on which he lands as gentle as a feather.Miranda July (born February 15, 1974) is a performance artist, musician, writer, actress and film director. She currently resides in Los Angeles, California, after having lived for many years in Portland, Oregon. Born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger, she works under the surname of "July," which can be traced to a character from a "girlzine" Miranda created with a high school friend called "Snarla." If you were searching around fora representative creative artist for the middle of the 21st century’s second decade, you could do a lot worse than 40-year-old Miranda July. She’s an actress, a filmmaker, a performance artist, a conceptual artist, an APP, a short story writer and now, finally with this book, a novelist… she is a fresh, feminist, groundbreaking, creative sensibility who should probably be treated in entirety, if at all…Love, perverse if not polymorphous, is the basic subject there, although other subjects include everything from self-defense to lactation. Her literary voice is lively enough to be compulsive here.”

Deliberately Jumping the Gun: In "The Chump Champ", Droopy and Spike are competing in sports events. For the first event, the 100 meter dash, Spike has the starting pistol, but after going "On your mark, get set..." he runs to within one step away from the finish line. The moment he yells "Go!" and fires the gun, Droopy instantly zips to the finish line, then tells Spike that he might be cheating. Risky fiction: hilarious, dark, uncomfortable, and so accurate in mapping the way fantasies can overtake life that it’s also one of the most honest character studies I’ve read in a longtime…when pregnancy and an infant are introduced in the second half of the book, imagination and fantasy life are replaced with very real anguish, protection, and love.” In 2006, after completing her first feature film, she went on to create another multimedia piece, Things We Don’t Understand and Definitely are Not Going To Talk About, which she performed in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York.I considered this. What if a person were to wake up and immediately have sex, before urination? Surely that would raise your basal body temperature too. If I had been in my early thirties instead of my early forties would he have said before first urination or sexual intercourse? That’s the problem with men my age, I’m somehow older than them. Phillip is in his sixties, so he probably thinks of me as a younger woman, a girl almost. Not that he thinks of me yet—I’m just someone who works at Open Palm. But that could change in an instant; it could have happened today, in the waiting room. It still might happen, if I called him. Dr. Broyard handed me a form.

Here is Cheryl, a tightly-wound, vulnerable woman who lives alone, with a perpetual lump in her throat. She is haunted by a baby boy she met when she was six, who sometimes recurs as other people's babies. Cheryl is also obsessed with Phillip, a philandering board member at the women's self-defense non-profit where she works. She believes they've been making love for many lifetimes, though they have yet to consummate in this one.Artangel produces and presents extraordinary art in unexpected places in London, the UK and beyond. For over 30 years Artangel has generated some of the most talked – about art of recent times, including projects with Clio Barnard, Jeremy Deller, Roger Hiorns, Michael Landy, Steve McQueen, Rachel Whiteread, an d more recently Ryoji Ikeda, PJ Harvey and Jorge Otero – Pailos’s The Ethics of Dust at Westminster Hall, Houses of Parliament. Appearing anywhere from vacant apartments stores to subterranean vaults and London’s night sky, Artangel produces art that surprises, inspires and wouldn’t be possible within the confines of a gallery. The Pearly Gates: The short Symphony in Slang opens with a line of deceased souls at the Pearly Gates being given halos by St. Peter and allowed into Heaven. Miranda July has created in her stories and here in her amazing debut novel something close to a new literary genre. If science fiction speculates on new technologies in human life, July imagines new emotions that have never been described. Anger is erotic. Pleasure feels like fear. Sex dynamites everything around it. And yet we can’t stop having it. Not since David Foster Wallace has a writer so hilariously captured the wince-worthy adventures of the awkward human beings we all pretend we aren’t.” Despite being, plotwise, so bonkersly unlike anything you have ever thought of before, I don't mean to suggest that it's absurdist or surreal or Naked Lunch–ian or anything like that. It's normal people doing things that are only a beat or two off of normal; you just have to go with it, and then before you know it it has become perfectly reasonable and you're on to the next thing.