Quirky, kooky — and kinky — stories from Miranda July

"No one belongs here more than you."

by Miranda July

Scribner, 224 pp., $23

Miranda July does everything. When she makes a movie, she writes, directs and stars in it. When she authors a book — she will be in Seattle this week to promote her first short-story collection — she even creates the Web site (www.noonebelongsheremorethanyou.com). And on that Web site, ever helpful, she suggests what you should wear while you read the collection of stories.

Despite a performance career as an artist-of-all-trades, July is probably best known for her first feature film, "Me and You and Everyone We Know," a darling of the festival circuit which won prizes at Sundance and Cannes.

Her fiction is drawing comparisons to Lorrie Moore, but that seems approximate at best. "No one belongs here more than you.," which contains stories previously published in The New Yorker and elsewhere, evokes something much weirder and much more intimate. Something like the Jane Campion of the early "Sweetie" and "A Girl's Own Story" days.

July's writing is fiction for the New Age, the Age of Too Much Information, where there is no detail too personal for your MySpace page. The stories are lined with creepy offhand particulars about her characters' fetishistic sex lives — everything from incest to self-gratification to voyeurism.

That may be off-putting for some readers, which is a shame because what really resonates is the clarity of her voice and the weird innocence that shines through. In "Something That Needs Nothing," a pair of teenage girls run away to Portland (where July lived before moving to Los Angeles) together. One is desperately obsessed with the other and has been forever. "In an ideal world," the story begins, "we would have been orphans."

Together they descend into a sordid new life that culminates with the narrator getting a job as a peepshow girl in an adult-video store. While waiting to begin her first night of work, she wanders through a closed strip mall; a rabbit in a pet shop seems to recognize her, and hops to the window to look at her more closely. "It knew me from before, like an old teacher or a friend of my parents." The pair regard each other knowingly — "it sniffed my wild, sad urgency and guessed that I was up to no good" — as close as they can get without touching, with a sheet of cold glass between them.

July is a strange and compelling new voice; her worlds feel real and surreal and desperately sad and filled with what one character calls "secret joy," at the same time. And while there is often a frustrating air of utter self-absorption about many of these disconnected souls, their hearts are powerfully human.

Mary Brennan is a writer and farmer who lives on the Key Peninsula.