Miranda July has an unconventional take on the world. The filmmaker, author and artist is best known for her films: the award-winning Me and You and Everyone We Know and more recently, The Future. Her first foray into writing was the short story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You, and July first ventured into novel-writing earlier this year. She will be participation in a reading and discussion (in English and German) of The First Bad Man at Huxleys Neue Welt on Friday, November 13.

The story is funny, frank and as weird as you'd expect from the always-unmistakable director/renaissance woman. Its central character is an homage to the unloveable and unheroic, and takes July's characteristic joy in the humble secrets of human experience to a deeper, often heartbreaking place. 

The sexual intimacy portrayed in The First Bad Man is unashamed in its queer framing. It's definitely sexy, but not in any conventional way, and takes delight in moving outside the boxes of normative sexual fantasies. As July said, in conversation with the author Sheila Heti, in January 2015: "[Writing about sex] does seem like a pretty wide open territory. I mean, the second you're in there, you're like, 'Well I can think of 19 different things that have never been written...' And that's not true of most territories."

Although July is often pigeonholed as “kooky” – in the way that innovative female artists often are – her debut novel is an award-winning, exciting foray into a world where everything is queer, but no one has to call it that.

Josie Thaddeus-Johns

Miranda July, reading, 13.11., 20:00, Huxley's Neue Welt