More than just a bookstore, DC’s Lambda Rising (1625 Connecticut Ave., NW,) functions also as a community center and intellectual resource for the capital’s queer residents. Please continue to support it by buying this and other titles on their website or at the TNG shelf at their brick and mortar location. If you do the latter you get to chat with their employees, which I promise is always a pleasant experience.

Though queer writer Miranda July peppers her debut short story collection “No One Belongs Here More Than You” with a series of despondant gay and lesbian characters, she also proves herself to be equal-opportunity. True happiness is so fleeting in her fiction that no one — gay, straight, anonymous, incestuous — gets to achieve it for very long. I’ve never seen her movie “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” but if its half as effectively depressing as “No One Belongs Here” I won’t be watching it within weeks of a bad mood.

The stories, by and large, concern themselves with people who are given one chance to expand their tiny worlds or worldviews, and who generally bungle it through their own inertia. Some stories, like “This Person” feature a protagonist that is little more than a concept. But in a book where many characterst end to blur together, it is the queer ones that stand out the most. The best story in the collection, “Something That Needs Nothing,” is also the bleakest. It tells of two teenage lesbians who move to Portland together and find out that life can be as dark and crushing as, well, a Miranda July short story. But it ends on a slightly positive note, giving the reader just enough emotional energy to move on to the next story.

Support your local bookstore today by purchasing this book at LambdaRising.com.