James Magruder Book Launch: NO ONE IS LOOKING AT YOU with Betsy Boyd

The Ivy is over the moon to celebrate our bookseller James Magruder's new collection of short stories, and we hope you'll join us!

If you've interacted with Jim in the shop, or in one of his many roles around Baltimore, you have likely encountered his razor-sharp wit, emotional perceptiveness, and big heart-- all of which are on full display in NO ONE IS LOOKING AT YOU. These stories charts the evolving landscape of queer identity with heartbreaking honesty and wicked charm. The first half, Origin Stories, follows a group of closeted young men fumbling toward self-knowledge at Cornell University in the late ’70s and early ’80s—when disco was dying, Reagan was rising, and love still had to hide in the shadows.

Smart, sexy, and unafraid to look longing in the eye, No One Is Looking at You is a glorious reminder that while we’re all just trying to make it through the scene, the performance is always personal.

We're delighted to welcome Betsy Boyd, Associate Professor in the MFA Program at The University of Baltimore, as interlocutor, in what's sure to be a lovely, celebratory evening on the patio. See you there!

Books will be available for sale at the event.

Click here to view the book trailer for NO ONE IS LOOKING AT YOU.

James Magruder is a fiction writer, playwright, and translator. His adaptations of Dickens, Marivaux, Molière, Gozzi, Lesage, Labiche, Giraudoux, and Hoffmanstal have been staged across America, and in Japan, England, and Germany. His Three French Comedies was named an “Outstanding Literary Translation” by the American Literary Translators Association. He has published four books of fiction (Sugarless, Let Me See It, Love Slaves of Helen Hadley Hall, and Vamp Until Ready), and written the books for two Broadway musicals (Triumph of Love and Head Over Heels, the blank verse mash-up of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and the song catalog of the Go-Go’s. His first--and last--book of nonfiction, The Play's the Thing: Fifty Years of Yale Repertory Theater (1966-2016), was published three months ago by Yale University Press.

Betsy Boyd directs the Creative Writing and Publishing Arts MFA program at the University of Baltimore and is the recipient of Maryland State Arts Council awards, an Elliot Coleman Writing Fellowship, a James A. Michener Fellowship and residencies through Fundación Valparaíso, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Betsy’s fiction has been published in Kenyon Review, StoryQuarterly, Shenandoah, at American Short Fiction, Eclectica, and elsewhere. Her short story “Scarecrow” received a Pushcart Prize.

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