3.5
The First Bad Man
ByPublisher Description
The New York Times Bestseller
The “brilliant, hilarious, irreverent, piercing” (O, The Oprah Magazine) debut novel from Miranda July, acclaimed filmmaker, artist, and author of All Fours, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction.
Cheryl Glickman believes in romances that span centuries and a soul that migrates between babies. She works at a women’s self-defense nonprofit and lives alone. When her bosses ask if their twenty-year-old daughter, Clee, can move into her house for a while, Cheryl’s eccentrically ordered world explodes. And yet it is Clee—the selfish, cruel blond bombshell—who bullies Cheryl into reality and, unexpectedly, leads her to the love of a lifetime.
Tender, gripping, slyly hilarious, infused with raging sexual fantasies 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 “brilliant, hilarious, irreverent, piercing” (O, The Oprah Magazine) debut novel from Miranda July, acclaimed filmmaker, artist, and author of All Fours, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction.
Cheryl Glickman believes in romances that span centuries and a soul that migrates between babies. She works at a women’s self-defense nonprofit and lives alone. When her bosses ask if their twenty-year-old daughter, Clee, can move into her house for a while, Cheryl’s eccentrically ordered world explodes. And yet it is Clee—the selfish, cruel blond bombshell—who bullies Cheryl into reality and, unexpectedly, leads her to the love of a lifetime.
Tender, gripping, slyly hilarious, infused with raging sexual fantasies 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.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe First Bad Man Reviews
3.5
Elena Leblon
Created 3 days agoShare
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Sophia Callis
Created 4 days agoShare
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Amy Noelle
Created 7 days agoShare
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“the first book I read by July was no one belongs here more than you, which I loved. Notably it is a collection of short stories.
this one is too damn long, scenes drag on, and experiential descriptions sometimes feel superfluous. and maybe that is part of it, the concept of cycles and recursion (a lot of this book feels like a pretty good experience of OCD, it certainly got me anxious at times). but after a while I stopped caring about what Cheryl cared about and I started skipping paragraphs, then pages, then chapters. then I read the epilogue and then worked backwards from there and I really didn't care for where this story ended up.”
Angella
Created 7 days agoShare
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“So fucking original!! Genuinely would recommend this to all my weird friends”
Nicole Ring
Created 10 days agoShare
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“A book that I loved listening to but every time I thought about what was actually happening in the story I thought what the f***”
About Miranda July
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. In 2025 she was named one of the 100 most influential people by Time and received a Guggenheim Fellowship. July lives in Los Angeles.
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