Miranda July at Manchester Literature Festival at Central Library

The Manchester Literature Festival spring programme continues into summer and June with Miranda July. Confused? Don’t be (or at least don’t let on). It’s a rare chance to catch the witty and original US-based writer, film-maker and artist Miranda July in town, as she discusses her new novel, All Fours, with writer and fellow Vermonter Kate Feld.

Miranda July is the author of four books including the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award-winning short story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You, published in 2007, and the non-fiction story collection It Chooses You (2011). Her debut novel The First Bad Man came out in 2015 and All Fours is her second novel. She has also written and directed three feature films, while also starring in the first two, The Future (2011) and 2005’s Me and You and Everyone We Know, which won the prestigious Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and a Special Jury Prize at Sundance. Her most recent film, Kajillionaire, came out in 2020.

In All Fours, a semi-famous artist declares her intention to drive cross-country from West Coast Los Angeles to East Coast New York. Instead, she checks into a motel half an hour from the home she shares with her husband and child and begins a reinvention which is to have a profound impact on her life. In Miranda July’s unique, funny and tender voice, All Fours explores the societal boundaries placed on middle-aged women through desire, sex, perimenopause and motherhood, questioning what freedom might look like within those constraints.

George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo, and previous guest at Manchester Literature Festival, describes the book as: “A giddy, bold, mind-blowing tour de force by one of our most important literary writers. Funny, honest, rich with the energy of the mind, All Fours will jump-start your relation to language and cause you to think anew about the nature of desire.”