The New York Times–bestselling author of The First Bad Man returns with an irreverently sexy, tender, hilarious, and surprising novel about a woman upending her life
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.
Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.
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Multifaceted storytelling across fiction, performance art, and cinema defines a distinct voice in contemporary literature, blending surreal humor with intimate observations of human vulnerability. Miranda July established her literary reputation with award-winning short stories before gaining widespread acclaim for bestselling novels such as All Fours.
Born Miranda Jennifer Grossinger on February 15, 1974, in Barre, Vermont, July grew up in Berkeley, California, in a family of writers and publishers. She attended the University of California, Santa Cruz, before embarking on an interdisciplinary artistic career that encompassed performance art, live monologues, zines, and independent filmmaking. She wrote, directed, and starred in feature films including Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) and The Future (2011), later writing and directing Kajillionaire (2020). Her short fiction appeared in major publications such as The Paris Review, Harper's, and The New Yorker.
Her literary debut, the short story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You (2007), won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and was published across twenty-three countries. She followed this with the nonfiction work It Chooses You (2011) and her debut novel, The First Bad Man (2015), which became a New York Times bestseller. Her second novel, All Fours (2024), achieved critical success as a bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award, the Women's Prize for Fiction, and the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. In addition to her literary awards, July received a Guggenheim Fellowship and recognition on Time magazine's list of influential figures in 2025.
July's writing explores themes of loneliness, female desire, body autonomy, self-reinvention, and the unexpected intimacies that form between strangers. Her prose balances existential absurdity with subtle emotional truth, often capturing characters undergoing quiet life transformations or confronting awkward interpersonal dynamics. By translating the unconventional staging of performance art into narrative fiction, she crafts stories centered on internal monologues, idiosyncratic behavioral details, and tender reckonings with vulnerability.
