James Magruder: James Magruder

Every September since 1958 a fresh batch of residents arrives at the Yale graduate dormitory that bears the name of one Miss Helen Hadley, a nineteenth-century ectoplasmic emanation still residing at 420 Temple Street, New Haven, Connecticut. Every year she selects her favorites, follows their adventures, cheers on their romantic shifts and stratagems, and picks up their lingo. With the university presently threatening to bulldoze her home, she has decided to chronicle her favorite year, the nine months in 1983-84 when Silas Huth, Becky Engelking, Nixie Bolger, Carolann Chudek, and Randall Flinn took up the manacles of erotic attachment and parsed meaning from every little movement of their rapacious, beating hearts. In Love Slaves of Helen Hadley Hall, Miss Hadley promises her readers carnal congress, a near-homicide, and a wedding finale, for their tale of communal bondage is one of love surprised, love confessed, betrayed, renounced, repelled, of suspect leanings and trembling declarations, of hymens under siege and innumerable searching looks in the mirror.

Fiction. LGBT Studies. An ornery cat named Olive. A pair of fraught relationships. A baby from Jiangxi. The city of Baltimore. In James Magruder's WORTH OUR BREATH, we see the way other people's choices can make us question our own, how difficult commitment can be even for the most dedicated couples, and how sometimes an old, stained mattress can outlast a friendship. This chapbook was designed by James Dissette and includes original illustrations by Stuart Cawley. This edition is an offset paperback version of the original letterpress hardcover edition.

James Magruder’s collection of linked stories follows two gay cousins, Tom and Elliott, from adolescence in the 1970s to adulthood in the early ’90s. With a rueful blend of comedy and tenderness, Magruder depicts their attempts to navigate the closet and the office and the lessons they learn about libidinous coworkers, r#65533;sum#65533; boosting, Italian suffixes, and frozen condoms. As Tom and Elliot search for trusting relationships while the AIDS crisis deepens, their paths diverge, leading Tom to a new sense of what matters most. Magruder is especially adept at rendering the moments that reveal unwritten codes of behavior to his characters, who have no way of learning them except through painful experience. Loss is sudden, the fallout portrayed with a powerful economy. In Tom and Elliott, readers come to recognize themselves, driven by the same absurd desires and unconscious impulses, subjected to the same fates.

Things look bad for Rick Lahrem, a high school sophomore in a cookie-cutter Chicago suburb in 1976. His mother's second husband is a licensed psychologist who eats like an ape, his stepsister is a stoner slut, and his father is engaged to a Southern belle. Rick's only solace is his growing collection of original Broadway-cast LPs, bought on the sly at Wax Trax.     After he brings two girls in speech class to tears by reading a story aloud, Rick is coaxed onto the interscholastic forensics team to perform an eight-minute dramatic interpretation of The Boys in the Band, the controversial sixties play about homosexuality. Unexpectedly successful at this oddball event, Rick begins winning tournaments and making friends with his teammates.     Rick also discovers the joys of sex-with a speech coach from a rival school-just as his mother, reacting to a deteriorating home environment, makes an unnerving commitment to Christ. The newly confident Rick assumes this too shall pass-until the combined forces of family, sex, and faith threaten to undo him at the state meet in Peoria.     James Magruder's Sugarless offers a ruefully entertaining take on the simultaneous struggles of coming-out, coming-of-age, and coming-to-Jesus.     A selection of InsightOut Book Club   Finalist, Lambda Book Award for Gay Debut Fiction, Lambda Literary Foundation   Finalist, TLA Gaybie Award for Best Gay Fiction   Semi-finalist, James Branch Cabell First Novelist Award, Virginia Commonwealth University   Semi-finalist, William Saroyan International Prize For Writing, Stanford University