It Chooses You

Miranda July

Canongate Books, Dec 1, 2011 - Photography - 224 pages

In the summer of 2009, Miranda July was struggling to finish writing the screenplay for her much-anticipated second film. During her increasingly long lunch breaks, she began to obsessively read the PennySaver, the iconic clas­sifieds booklet that reached everywhere and seemed to come from nowhere. Who was the person selling the "Large leather Jacket, $10"? It seemed important to find out - or at least it was a great distraction from the screenplay. Accompanied by photographer Brigitte Sire, July crisscrossed Los Angeles to meet a random selection of PennySaver sellers, glimpsing thirteen surprisingly moving and profoundly specific realities, along the way shaping her film, and herself, in unexpected ways. Elegantly blending narrative, interviews, and photographs with July's off-kilter honesty and deadpan humour, this is a story of procrastination and inspiration, isolation and connection, and grabbing hold of the invisible world.

About the author

Miranda July is a filmmaker, artist and writer. She wrote, directed and starred in The Future (2011) and Me and You 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 No One Belongs Here More Than You (2007) won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and has been published in twenty-three countries. The nonfictional It Chooses You was published in 2011. In 2000 July created the participatory website Learning to Love You More with the artist Harrel Fletcher, and a companion book was published in 2007; the work is now in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She designed Eleven Heavy Things, an interactive sculpture garden, for the 2009 Venice Biennale, and in 2013 more than a hundred thousand people subscribed to her e-mail based artwork We Think Alone. In 2014 she created the audience-participatory performance, New Society, and launched Somebody, a messaging service created with support from Miu Miu. Raised in Berkeley, California, July lives in Los Angeles.

Bibliographic information

• Title: It Chooses You
• Author: Miranda July
• Publisher: Canongate Books, 2011
• ISBN: 0857862839, 9780857862839
• Length: 224 pages
• Subjects: Literary Collections / Essays; Photography / Photoessays & Documentaries