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...

"I figure that some of you have been in plays, and so know how a closing night feels. With some shows, it's a relief. With others, you're fighting tears. Robin's theory is that it depends on how you feel about the makeshift family you've created for those weeks." Says Cary Dunkler, chorus boy turned master baker, who forms part of the network of protagonists in Vamp Until Ready. Cary, Isa Vass, Kristy Schroyer, Judy Gabelson, and Mark Shinner have lives that are transformed in surprising ways by working on or backstage at the Hangar Theatre, a summer stock outfit in upstate New York in the 1980s. They make—and remake—their families in this closely observed, ultimately comic valentine to the Socialist-leaning hamlet of Ithaca and to the pleasures of putting on a show at warp speed in hot weather.Praise for Vamp Until Ready "James Magruder's warm-hearted, hair-raising, and hilarious new novel, Vamp Until Ready, is a cross...