Jack the Modernist [Paperback]

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.“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 hil£Ø