Artists Space

Robert Glück: Jack the Modernist

Book Launch
November 5, 2025, 7pm

Wednesday, November 5
7pm
Free, no RSVP required

Please join us for a book launch celebrating Robert Glück's Jack the Modernist. Kay Gabriel will introduce Glück and join him for a dialogue.

Book cover featuring two illustrated nude men, one is laying down along the bottom of the cover, and the other stands and frames the right side. In the center is a smaller illustration of buildings. Text reads "JACK THE MODERNIST / ROBERT GLÜCK."
Cover of Jack the Modernist, New York Review Books, 2025. Cover by Louis Fratino. [Book cover featuring two illustrated nude men, one is laying down along the bottom of the cover, and the other stands and frames the right side. In the center is a smaller illustration of buildings. Text reads "JACK THE MODERNIST / ROBERT GLÜCK."]

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.

Kay Gabriel is a writer and organizer. Her latest book is Perverts (Nightboat, 2025). She's the Editorial Director at the Poetry Project and lives in NYC.