Miranda Judy's stories can be "blisteringly good"

Miranda July . . . Miranda July. The author's name sounded familiar. A recent book of hers received positive (?). interesting (?) reviews so how bad can No One Belongs Here More Than You be? Which is why I bought a copy her short story collection at a used book sale.

Miranda July's name was familiar because she is the author of All Fours, her second novel published in 2024 which became a best seller. I might have been more informed about her if I followed movies seriously; she's made a number of well-received independent films, acting in some of them.

No One Belongs Here More Than You, her first book, published in 2007, contains stories originally published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, Zeotrope, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Not too shabby.

The stories range in length from three or four pages (barely a sketch) to almost twenty. Inevitably they vary in interest and effect. Josh Lacey, a reviewer for The Guardian, wrote that "although a few read like experiments that didn't quite work, the majority of the 16 stories in No One Belongs Here More Than You are blisteringly good."

I think that even the experiments can teach (or suggest) us as writers and readers something about other people and reality and that the last story "How to Tell Stories to Children" is a marvel. July tells the story in a series of brief vignettes, each filled with sharp sentences that indicate character and situation: "At the baby shower, Tom's mother walked around with a clipboard assigning all the guests days on which to bring a healthy meal to the new parents. I was called a meal tree . . . ."

The story sketches the lives of Tom, his wife, their child, and the narrator as the child grows to become a college-age woman. Some readers may be put off by July's lack of quotation marks and speaker citations, but their absence lack leaves the page clean and I had no trouble following who was speaking. 

Because the writing and the stories in No One Belongs Here More Than You are so strong, I added July's novel All Fours to my To Read list. Meanwhile I'm rereading a couple of these stories to see if I can see how she does what she does.

. . .from a store? Or . . . at a store?

Many reasons exist to spend time every day on the Duolingo language learning site. It never grows tired or irritable at repeating a work or a phrase. It teaches the way to say something in a language, rather than teach rules of grammar—much the way a child learns. The lessons contain a variety of exercises: vocabulary drills, translations from the language into English and from English into the language, dialogues in everyday speech.

To exercise my brain I've been reviewing Japanese with the program. I'm incidentally learning contemporary Japanese—apparently much of what I say sounds old fashioned to native ears. Very occasionally I bump on a problem with the program. For example, the other day the lesson wanted students to translate the sentence "I always buy my clothes from this store."

I translated it as この店ではいつも洋服買います。(Literally and word by word "This store at always western-style clothes to buy.") 

It was marked wrong. The program wanted 洋服はいつもこの店で買います。("Western-style clothes always this store from to buy.") (The personal pronoun is understood.)

Google Translate checked both translations and Duolingo's version does mean "I always buy my clothes from this store." My version does mean "I always buy my clothes at this store."

My mistake: I automatically translated the example sentence's English into ". . . at this store." To my ear, it's unnatural in American English to say you buy clothes or food or shoes from a store. 

A Duolingo mistake? A British usage? Or the site wants students to master the form it teaches? Sometimes these questions of language usage and movement from one to the other hurt my head, but I'll never forget where I buy clothes.

Another reason not to learn a foreign language

The New York Times has an article by a reporter who does not speak more than a few words of Japanese but, for the most part, did not need to on a recent visit.  He used Apple's new Live Translation feature, which is built into AirPods Pro 3. When the feature is activated and someone speaks to you in Japanese (or Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Korean with more to come), you hear what is said in English.

The reporter attended a fire ritual at a Buddhist temple in Tokyo wearing one earbud. "Two monks pounded giant taiko drums as others chanted in unison under a cloud of fragrant smoke. Then the priest delivered closing remarks in Japanese. And in a miracle of technology, I understood quite a bit of it."

As he and his guide left, he repeated, in English, some of the priest’s comments to his guide to be sure had had understood correctly. "I recounted the priest’s admonition to set aside unwholesome feelings of anger and greed, and work instead to show compassion and generosity, as well as his reminder that his temple was still accepting donations for those affected by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. '

"You told me you didn’t speak Japanese,' my guide said, pleasantly surprised. Beyond a few basic greetings and food terms, I don’t."

So there you are. If a Japanese contact also has the AirPods you can speak in English your companion will hear Japanese. Until now you have had to talk to your iPhone in English and the Japanese will appear on the screen via Google Translate or the Translate app on the phone.

While the program is not as knowledgeable as a knowledgable human—it has problems with gendered languages, in noisy environments, and if someone speaks rapidly—it is a remarkable achievement. So why make the effort to learn one of the languages AI already knows?

Here's the link to the Times story: 
https://www.nytimes.com/202https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/travel/airpods-live-translation-japan.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20251226&instance_id=168491&nl=the-morning&regi_id=89905373&segment_id=212775&user_id=f9b3114fc341a88716a8c238d80c98c65/

I am now an anthologized author

Story Sanctum, the online magazine that published my short story Kanazawa in the Rain las summer, has included it in the organization's third anthology of fiction and nonfiction, Tales from the Vault. 

Because I am not the most disinterested reviewer of the book, let me quote from the Amazon listing (which also is not entirely disinterested. "Inside these pages, you will find a rich anthology of stories designed to speak to your heart, mind, and soul. These tales were taken from our vault of fiction and nonfiction stories. They represent some of our favorite stories from the past year.

"Story Sanctum is a shrine for sacred storytelling. We curate compelling fiction and nonfiction stories with a clear point of view that captures the truth and beauty, sacredness and strangeness, heartbreak, horror, and hope of the human condition. For us, sacredness transcends any one religion and does not have to be religious at all. Our stories honor the sacredness of life found in the human experience. The viewpoints of the writers are their own, but they give us unique insights into their lives and our shared human experience."

The anthology contains 36 short stories and 16 nonfiction works, so a bargain at $15.25. Story Sanctum's cofounder, editor, and contributor Shawn Casselberry writes, "We priced the book as low as we could to make it affordable as presents for the holiday. Any proceeds made will go to pay our monthly writers and/or promote their writing to keep the stories going!" 

At under 39¢ a story how can you go wrong? Especially when I know my story alone is worth at least $1.98.

At this abby you don't have to be a believer

Why has Charlotte Wood's novel Stone Yard Devotional affected me and hundreds of other readers so powerfully? I don't identify with the narrator, a middle-aged woman who joins a small and struggling abby in what sounds like Australia's outback. She claims to be an atheist and does not believe in the efficacy of prayer and the book contains no deep, serious discussions of religious faith or lack of. 

The narrator participates in the abby's routines and she works as hard as any of the sisters who, for the most part, accept her presence. It sounds as if the world has been too much with her and she wants a break, and don't we all?

The narrator grew up in the small town not far from the abby so in a sense she has come home. At the beginning of the book she has a husband but he is elsewhere and he plays no role in the narrator's abby life. She apparently has no children and her parents are dead. She worked for a non-profit in Sydney, but does not miss the job. She has no wish to become nun but she settles into the abby's routine.

Three events (matters? occasions?) disturb the routine. A terrible plague of mice infest the abby. The mice eat the insulation off wiring, nest in the organ, turn cannibalistic if there is nothing to eat but other mice.  

Second, the bones of a dead—and presumed murdered—sister are returned to the abby where they sit in their casket alone in a room while the abbess struggles with the Australian bureaucracy to obtain permission to bury the nun on the abby's land.

Finally, the nun who accompanies the bones back from Thailand is a strong, outspoken, dynamic woman, someone the narrator had known and had known was tormented by other girls during their school days together. The narrator would be happy to watch the nun deliver the bones and leave but the pandemic has trapped her in the abby.

I repeat, why has Stone Yard Devotional affected me so powerfully? I don't know. The writing is clean. The narrator's thoughts and activities are plausible. We have a strong sense of the abby life and the narrator's character. The best I can say is that I found the novel to be like a warm bath, cleansing and renewing and comforting.

How do we tell our stories to ourselves?

They say (whoever "they" are) that you can't judge a book by its cover. Add to that (and you can credit me for this) that you can't judge a book by its heft.

The Details by Ia Genberg and translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson is only 133 pages, but what it lacks in verbiage it makes up for in impact. The pages are black with long sentences that the translator says are sometimes longer in Swedish which has to be a translator's challenge. 

The story, such as it is, is narrated by a woman who lies bedridden with a high fever. Struck with an urge to revisit a novel from her past she finds an inscription inside the book: a get-well-soon message from Johanna, an ex-girlfriend who is now a famous television host. As she flips through the book, pages from the (unnamed) woman’s own past begin to come alive, scenes of events and people she cannot forget.

There are moments with Johanna, and Niki, the friend who disappeared years ago without a phone number or an address and with no online footprint. There is Alejandro, who appears like a storm in precisely the right moment. And Brigitte, whose elusive qualities mask a secret.

The Details is built around these four portraits; the small details that, pieced together, make up a life. Can a loved one really disappear? Who is a portrait's real subject, the person being painted or the person holding the brush? Do we fully become ourselves through our connections to others? The novel raises profound questions about the nature of relationships and how we tell our stories to ourselves and to others. 

Genberg says she "started over from the beginning of whatever chapter she was working on each time she sat down to write, rereading the entire cloth of the text countless times"—a literary Penelope. The result is dense, almost prose poetry, yet somehow still readable, accessible, which has to be an achievement by the translator. I believe that reading—and rereading—The Details will help make me a better writer. 

 

Watch out if she was born in 1966

With 2026 almost upon us a Japanese friend tells me she was born in 1966—a significant year in Japan. It was a 丙午 yeaa (pronounced hinoeuma) and which my dictionary defines as "Fire Horse (43rd term of the sexagenary cycle, e.g. 1906, 1966, 2026)​."

A moment's research on the web and I found this: "In 1966, Japan experienced a sudden drop in its fertility rate—for just that year. During the 1960s, the fertility rate was about 2.0 to 2.1 children per woman, but in 1966 it dropped dramatically to 1.6 children per woman. The number of births in 1966 was much lower than in surrounding years." How come?

"The superstition is that women born in this year of the 'Fire-Horse' have a bad personality and will kill their future husband. I presume the parents then were worried about their daughter’s huge disadvantage in the future marriage market, so they chose to avoid the risk of having a girl. Sex detection during pregnancy was not available then, so many families avoided having children altogether in 1966. This kind of superstition seems to have been more prevalent in rural areas than in urban areas, because the fertility drop in urban areas was less than in rural areas." (https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/opendata/curse-fire-horse-how-superstition-impacted-fertility-rates-japan)

I presume that the curse (misfortune) only works in Japan, but you can't be too careful. My friend for her part had less competition applying to college, is happily married, and has a delightful personality. 

You can visit the actual heartbeat library in Japan

Despite the standard disclaimer that "any similarity to . . . places . . . is purely coincidental" Les Archives du Coeur ("The Heart Archives") actually exists on Teshima, a small island in the Seto Inland Sea. Created by French artist Christian Boltanski, visitors can make recordings of their heartbeat and listen to the recorded heartbeats of other people from around the world.

Laura Imai Messina—or her translator Lucy Rand—calls it and her novel The Heartbeat Library. When at the end of the book her characters visit Teshima, it reads like a TripAdvisor entry, except that what has happened earlier makes the writing far more powerful, more moving than any such entry.

Shuichi is a successful children’s books illustrator. He was married with a young son who dies in a freak swimming pool accident. The marriage cannot survive the stress of the death (his wife blames herself) and they divorce. His mother dies and Shuichi moves from Tokyo to Kamakura to clean out the family home. He wants to "turn the house into something so unfamiliar that he could let it go." He discovers an eight year old boy, Kenta, is visiting the house when he is absent. He sets up a camera to see what he is doing and discovers Kenta is unsealing boxes and taking virtually worthless objects away.

Shuichi manages to connect with Kenta through his illustrations and helps the boy with his Japanese studies. Kenta begins spending time with Shuichi the way he had studied wit his mother. He liked to visit because his own parents fought constantly

Shuichi met Sayaka when the young woman prepared his mother’s body for her funeral and he mixes up "the emotions of saying goodbye to his mother with the hazy memory of this woman." As Shuichi gains the Kenta's friendship and Sayaka's affection (or love), a lightness returns to his life. He has survived.

According to the book, Laura Imai Messina was born in Rome, moved to Japan when she was twenty-three and has lived in Japan for fifteen years. She is the author of an earlier novel The Phone Box at the End of the Word.  The Heartbeat Library, written in Italian, is interesting if only because all the characters are Japanese, and with one insignificant exception the perceptions and feelings and words of the characters all ring true. I regret only that I myself will never been able to visit the Heartbeat Library, and the publisher should be ashamed of itself for not including the translator's name on the book's cover.

It may not be real, but it could be

How do novelists convince readers that their lies are true?

This important it seems to me when they want readers to believe their characters could be real people and the book's events could actually have happened.

One way to add verisimilitude ("the appearance of being true or real") is to set the action in a real place at a certain time and include historic events and figures. For example I set a novel in a low-income housing project at the corner if 125th and Amsterdam in the early 1960s and includes Malcolm X.

James McBride's wonderful The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is set in the fictional Pottstown, but which could be one of a number of small towns in western Pennsylvania not far from Reading. (Interestingly, there is a Pottsville, PA, in the area.) The time is identified as 1936. The Klu Klux Klan is active. The news from Europe is worrisome for Pottstown's handful of Jewish residents—handful because after a dozen Jewish families had immigrated the city fathers decided that was plenty and actively discouraged any more.

As the jacket describes, in 1972, when workers in Pottstown were digging the foundations for a new development, they found a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows—not exactly true (a common jacket copy failing). The residents did not know how it got there although we readers do.

Chicken Hill was the unpaved, unsewered area where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater in town and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Chicken Hill Black community worked together to keep the boy safe. That does not go well however, and raises the book's tension.

McBride is brilliantly able to overlap and deepen these characters’ stories. He evokes the ways the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they do to survive. I found it interesting that a theme running under the obvious story and events is the prejudice that Blacks and Jews must live with in America. Although a major and endearing character dies in the novel, which surprised me, the book concludes satisfactorily and plausibly. As the publisher says, "McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us."

An interesting way to structure a mystery

Clare Mackintosh says one New Year's morning a few years ago she was about to participate in a holiday group swim in the peaceful, mist-shrouded North Wales lake on which she lives when she had a thought: What if a body came floating by? That was the genesis of The Last Party, the first (of three) murder mysteries starring Ffion Morgan.

The border between Wales and England divides the book's invented Mirror Lake (a symbolic name) in half. The village of Com Coed is in Wales; a new, high-end, luxury resort/second-home community The Shore is in England, not more than a mile away and heartily resented by the village residents.

The body is that of Rhys Lloyd, a Com Coed native son who's had a successful musical career and who, with a business partner, developed the first five units of The Shore, one of which in which he lives with his wife and twin teen-age daughters.

The detectives charged with solving the murder are DC Ffion Morgan, who, separated, lives with her mother and sister in Com Coed, and DC Leo Brady, divorced, works out of the Cheshire Major Crimes Unit. I mention their marital status because it plays a minor role in both lives.

The two meet officially at the coroner's office to inspect the body at the beginning of the book and realize they have just spent New Year's night together in bed, both having given fake names and phone numbers—one of the most delightful and enjoyable introductions to a mystery I've read. 

The book has two timelines: everything that happened before the murder of Rhys—a thoroughly despicable person—and everything that happens after. What sets The Last Party apart from many mysteries is that events in the first timeline happen in reverse chronological order and involve the points of view of several different characters. Macintosh says that after writing it in a conventional chronological sequence she structured the book this way to make it more interesting and to give her an opportunity to drop in clues and revelations at the most opportune and effective spots.

Some readers I know find The Last Party's structure and number of characters difficult or irritating or both. I thought it was one of the most stimulating and interesting mysteries I've read recently.