Description: "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 nonprofit 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 obsession 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"--
Brief description: Miranda July is a writer, filmmaker, and artist. Her debut novel, The First Bad Man, was an instant New York Times bestseller, and her collection of stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and has been published in twenty-three countries. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper's, and The New Yorker, and she is also the author of the novel All Fours, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction. In 2025 she was named one of the 100 most influential people by Time and received a Guggenheim Fellowship. July lives in Los Angeles.
Review Quotes: "Very funny... The novel exploded my expectations and became unlike anything I've ever read... hilarious... like many of us, July seems to have unbridled daydreams. Unlike most of us, she has wicked follow-through...July is exceptional at tracing the imaginative contours of sexuality... She is not after perfection: She loves the raw edges of emotion, she likes people and things to be a little worn. Life isn't silky, July is saying. The snags and the snafus bring the joy...The First Bad Man makes for a wry, smart companion on any day. It's warm, it has a heartbeat and a pulse. This is a book that is painfully alive." -Lauren Groff, The New York Times Book Review "The first novel by the filmmaker and artist Miranda July is like one of those strange mythological creatures that are part one thing, part another - a griffin or a chimera, perhaps, or a sphinx... An immensely moving portrait of motherhood and what it means to take care of a child... July writes of Cheryl's discovery of maternal love with heartfelt emotion and power." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "July is brilliant, hilarious, irreverent, piercing-even cringe-inducing, powering past sexual boundaries and gender identification into the surprising galaxy of primal connection. 'We all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before we ask someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.' Is there a more hopeful statement about humankind? In Miranda July's strange universe, probably not." -Jayne Anne Phillips, O, The Oprah Magazine "Lovely writing is interspersed with outer-space levels of strange...yet gradually this catalog of the grotesque builds into something beautiful, and this deeply odd book abruptly becomes transcendent. It feels like being on a plane when it takes off-all that rattling, speed, and oil, and then suddenly: airborne." -Molly Langmuir, Elle "July's work seems to grow deeper and more endearing with each iteration, while retaining its hysterical-neurotic charms and crisp, colloquial wit. July's first novel is a test of her range, which she ably passes. Single, middle-aged Cheryl Glickman expands from a collection of oddities - a baby obsession, a hallucinated ball in her throat, bizarre sexual fantasies - into someone with real longings, relationships, and opportunities for genuine growth and redemption." -New York Magazine "The First Bad Man is a disorienting mash-up of tongue-in-cheek social commentary, a celebration of oddball anti-heroines, and an embarrassingly honest look at the obsessions and entitlements we all (subconsciously or not) carry with us. I found myself laughing and cringing in equal measure, and even if I don't totally understand everything July is trying to say or do here, I've become a believer." -Bustle "Miranda July - filmmaker, performance artist and now novelist - is ready to leave the old Miranda July behind. You know the one: The curly haired gamin, her impossibly blue eyes swirling with ideas. The irrepressible creative blowing cinematic kisses to the world...The First Bad Man is about to complicate the picture. Striking and sexually bold, it reveals a side that is darker and that, truth be told, has lurked in her work all along...Though The First Bad Man actively challenges a reader's comfort zone, July creates a female neurotic archetype that's familiar and fresh at once." -Margaret Wappler, Los Angeles Times "July's work is tied together by her singular, confident, multifaceted voice. Her characters are often unusual and under-confident; her writing is always the former and never the latter. The First Bad Man, July's debut novel, tells the story of an outwardly boring person whose interior life is a mosaic of delightful neuroses and staggering self-doubt... beautifully worded, emotionally complex, impressively but quietly insightful, and, in the right light, so, so funny." -Josh Modell, The AV Club "Miranda July's novel is a brilliant document of our age of managed sharing... The First B