Publisher details

Author: Miranda July
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Genre: Fiction
Released: 13 January, 2015
ISBN: 9781782115045

The First Bad Man

Buy now

Retail partners

Synopsis

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.When Cheryl's bosses ask if their twenty-one-year-old daughter Clee can move into her house for a little while, Cheryl's eccentrically-ordered world explodes. And yet it is Clee--the selfish, cruel blond bombshell--who bullies Cheryl into reality and, unexpectedly, provides her the love of a lifetime.Tender, gripping, slyly hilarious, infused with raging sexual fantasies and fierce maternal love, Miranda July's first novel confirms her as a spectacularly original, iconic and important voice today, and a writer for all time. "The First Bad Man" is dazzling, disorienting, and unforgettable.

About the author

Miranda July

Miranda July is a filmmaker, artist, and writer. She wrote, directed and starred in the films The Future (2011) and You Me and Everyone We Know (2005), which won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, including the Camera d’Or.July’s fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New Yorker; her collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You (Scribner, 2007), won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and has been published in twenty-six countries. The non-fictional It Chooses You (McSweeney’s) was published in 2011. In 2000 July created the seminal participatory website, Learning to Love You More, with artist Harrell Fletcher and a companion book was published in 2007 (Prestel); the work is now in collection of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.July’s videos, performances, and web-based projects have been presented at sites such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and in two Whitney Biennials. She designed Eleven Heavy Things, an interactive sculpture garden, for the 2009 Venice Biennale; it was also presented in Union Square in New York (2010) and by Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (2011). In 2013 104,897 people from 170 countries subscribed to her email-based artwork, We Think Alone (commissioned by Magasin 3, Stockholm).July’s first novel, The First Bad Man, will be published by Scribner in early 2015. Raised in Berkeley, California, she lives in Los Angeles.