The First Bad Man: A Novel

Front Cover
Simon and Schuster, Jan 13, 2015 - Fiction - 276 pages
From the acclaimed filmmaker, artist, and bestselling author of No One Belongs Here More Than You, a spectacular debut novel that is so heartbreaking, so dirty, so tender, so funny--so Miranda July--that readers will be blown away.

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.

 

Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
11
Section 3
32
Section 4
33
Section 5
59
Section 6
77
Section 7
79
Section 8
93
Section 14
197
Section 15
206
Section 16
207
Section 17
217
Section 18
239
Section 19
251
Section 20
274
Section 21
275

Section 9
111
Section 10
131
Section 11
157
Section 12
169
Section 13
195
Section 22
276
Section 23
278
Section 24
279
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About the author (2015)

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. July lives in Los Angeles.

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