Jack the Modernist

A cult classic now back in print, this novel about sex, obsession, and art is one of the defining works of 1980s gay fiction.
A classic of postmodern fiction, Robert Glück's Jack the Modernist portrays the slow disintegration of a love affair set in the early 1980s. Bob is excited and lonely. He meets and pursues the elusive Jack, a director who is able to transform others without altering himself. Bob goes to the baths, gossips on the phone, goes to a bar, thinks about werewolves, has an orgasm, and discovers a number of truths about Jack. Out of print for decades, Glück's paean to desire and obsession explores the everyday in an idiom both intimate and lush. Sensual as well as sensational, self-conscious, but never self-serious, Jack the Modernist is a candid and heartfelt lover's discourse unlike any other.

Robert Glück is a poet, fiction writer, critic, potter, and editor. In the late 1970s, he and Bruce Boone founded New Narrative, a literary movement of self-reflexive storytelling that combines essay, lyric, and autobiography in one work. Glück is the author of the story collections Elements and Denny Smith; the novels Jack the Modernist, Margery Kempe, and About Ed (all published by New York Review Books); and a volume of collected essays, Communal Nude. His books of poetry include La Fontaine with Bruce Boone, Reader, In commemoration of the Visit with Kathleen Fraser, and I, Boombox. Glück has served as codirector at Small Press Traffic, as an associate editor at Lapis Press, and as the director of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, where he is an emeritus professor.
Rob Halpern organizes the Writers' Bloc, a poetry-writing workshop inside Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Southeast Michigan, and is a professor of creative writing at Eastern Michigan University. He's the author of Music for Porn and Hieroglyphs of the Inverted World, among other works. Together with Robin Tremblay-McGaw, Halpern is also the editor of From Our Hearts To Yours: New Narrative As Contemporary Practice.