The multi-hyphenate Miranda July has been weaving together film, fiction, monologue, mixed media, and live performance art since her ’90s riot grrrl days in Berkeley and Portland. Between her three films (Me and You and Everyone We Know, The Future and Kajillionaire), three books (No One Belongs Here More Than You, It Chooses You and The First Bad Man), music, acting and various art projects, July’s oeuvre explores the tender, messy awkwardness of human connection.
Sharing an eclectic list of her top ten desert island books with NY-based bookstore One Grand, July included the I Ching, a Studs Terkel oral history of American workers, and Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic diary of a teenage girl. Find her favorites below.
Rich And Poor: Photographs of Jim Goldberg by Jim Goldberg
“The format of this book is part of what makes it so great — that the subjects, very rich people and very poor people, got to see Goldberg’s portrait and write a sentence upon looking at themselves. It’s easy to objectify a subject — but also really easy to simply invite them to speak.” -MJ
Tattered Cloak & Other Stories by Nina Berberova and Marian Schwartz
“I don’t even know how I came across this book, but I read the title story every few years and just feel SO SAD. I thought my life would slip right through my fingers as it did for this narrator, and though it hasn’t…it also has. Super Russian.” -MJ
Photography & Film by Friedl Kubelka Vom Groller, Melanie Ohnemus, Andrea Picard
“I got this book a couple years ago and since then two people have bought it for me — and they are right to! The very specific, imperfect femininity — the sense of one woman’s struggle to make art — that’s my bailiwick.” -MJ
The Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures by Phoebe Gloeckner
“I was in a unique position to be influenced by this book because my parents published it when I was in my twenties (long before Marielle Heller made it into a great movie). It is the most graphic of all the graphic novels I own — and all from the point of view of a teenage girl.” -MJ
The I Ching by Anonymous (also rec’d by Leonard Cohen & Nipsey Hussle)
“I’ve been using the same I Ching since I was teenager when it was given to me by a fellow teenager; it seems too late to change now. I don’t use it often, but when I do it really does help. You can fool yourself, but not the I Ching.” -MJ
Birds of America by Lorrie Moore (also rec’d by Carrie Brownstein & St. Vincent)
“Long before I started to write in earnest, Lorrie Moore taught me you could have a woman narrator who was funny and complex and even wrong-headed. She opened up a lot of space that me and a million other women rushed into.” -MJ
Working by Studs Terkel
“There’s no law against asking strangers about their lives and feelings, although sometimes it really feels like there is. This is the kind of thing I want to read all day long, on every aspect of life (and there’s more, Terkel collected oral histories on race, the great depression, movies and plays, etc.)” -MJ
The Famished Road by Ben Okri
“I am a big fan of work in any medium that can take on death — being dead, being a soul — in a new way. It shares something with my favorite aspects of George Saunders in its matter of fact dealings with what might be considered supernatural.” -MJ
The Address Book by Sophie Calle
“Sophie Calle taught me that art isn’t this thing apart from your life, your embarrassing life as woman, girlfriend, person who longed — all that could be art if you were smart and elegant enough to notice what makes something interesting.” -MJ
Tenth of December by George Saunders (also rec’d by Phoebe Bridgers)