one and only; Miranda July's new story collection is a wry and affecting take on modern love.(Book review)

Byline: Megan O'grady

I think I pretty much tried to do everything else but be a writer," says Miranda July, the acclaimed performance artist and filmmaker, who now, with the publication of her astonishingly good collection of short stories, No One Belongs Here More than You (Scribner), adds "gifted author" to her list of enviable sobriquets. Growing up in a "very literary family"-her parents run a small press; Dostoyevsky and Baldwin were on the bookshelf-may have something to do with that reluctance, but in fact the doll-eyed, porcelain-skinned 33-year-old is an old hand when it comes to self-expression, having staged her first play at a punk club in her native Berkeley, California, at sixteen. From her provocative yet heartfelt performance pieces, which attract the likes of David Byrne and Cindy Sherman, to her Camera D'Or-winning art-house hit, Me and You and Everyone We Know, an appealingly fresh take on the fraught business of forging a connection to another person, July has made a career of locating the eerily universal in deeply personal material.

It was landing a mentor ...