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Jack the Modernist

Jack the Modernist

by Robert Glück, introduction by Rob Halpern

$16.95
$16.95
American Literature Available as E-Book
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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.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681379715
Pages: 176
Publication Date:

Praise

In Jack the Modernist self-exploration is so precise as to become impersonal. And some real sex at last. One is reminded of Genet and the transmutation of sex into something beyond sex. Glück even makes the disappointments, impasses and blind alleys of love moving and interesting. He seems to say everything in a fresh way. Not since Genet have we seen such pure love of the human body and soul…seen as one flesh palpable as a haze.
—William S. Burroughs

In Jack the Modernist, Robert Glück explores nuances of love never annotated before.
—Edmund White

Jack the Modernist is the novel with the most information and most beauty. Glück is an extraordinary philosopher of ethics, aesthetics, and the English sentence—a thinker of the originality of William James, with the formal range of his brother Henry. This republication is cause for celebration not only because Jack the Modernist is an utter joy to read, but because it calls our attention to an era-defining artist and public intellectual in our midst.
—Lucy Ives

In Jack the Modernist we find a testing and perfecting of language so skillful it appears to merge completely with the author’s intelligence and feelings.
—Dennis Cooper

What Glück shows us is that some of the most meaningful experiences of life only get deformed by being squeezed into the structure of a story. A collage like Jack the Modernist offers different satisfactions, different ways of apprehending experience.
—Matthew Cheney

The elaborate, imaginatively stunning discursiveness of Glück's writing is itself the very joyful, harrowing resolution to [Jack the Modernist’s] conflict; in effect, art compensates for life's failures to reciprocate. In so doing, it recasts Bob's obsessions with his own experience into a plethora of responses that engage the reader cathartically and craftily.
—Steve Benson, San Francisco Chronicle

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