No One is Looking at You

What happens when no one is watching-or when you think no one is?In this razor-sharp, tenderly comic collection, James Magruder 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.Fast forward forty years to Parting Shots, where Roger Hauf, a tenured professor of dramatic literature and full-time observer of human folly, offers up the hard-won wisdom of a man who's seen it all-and admits he still doesn't have it figured out. Roger knows his students tune him out, but maybe you'll listen when he tells you: everyone should chase love across an ocean at least once, the right dance belt changes everything, and-spoiler alert-high school never really ends.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.

James Magruder has published four other books of fiction: Sugarless, Let Me See It, Love Slaves of Helen Hadley Hall, and Vamp Until Ready (also from Rattling Good Yarns). Yale University Press published his Three French Comedies, a collection of translations that was cited as an "Outstanding Literary Translation of the Year" by the American Literary Translators Association; and The Play's the Thing: Fifty Years of Yale Repertory Theatre (1966-2016), his first-and last-book of non-fiction. His translations and adaptations of works by Marivaux, Molière, Lesage, Labiche, Gozzi, Dancourt, Hofmannsthal, Dickens, and Giraudoux have been produced off-Broadway, across the country, and in England, Japan, Australia, and Germany. He wrote, or co-wrote, the books for two Broadway musicals, Triumph of Love, and the more recent Head Over Heels, a deeply queer, blank verse mashup of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia (1590) and the song catalog of the Go-Go's. He is a five-time MacDowell Fellow and a 34-year resident of Baltimore.