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.