No One Belongs Here More Than You (2007)

For best results, as doctors like to say, watch the lovely 2005 film that Miranda July wrote, directed, and starred in, Me and You and Everyone We Know, before you dive into No One Belongs Here More Than You. After that introduction to her work (which beautifully juxtaposes the funny weird and the funny ha-ha), the fiction rings louder. These are terrific, if same-y, stories about a thousand kinds of loneliness. In ''The Swim Team,'' for instance, a melancholy woman teaches old folks how to swim on her living-room rug. There's often a stark sexual undercurrent in these stories. What would longing be without it? B+