An Affair for Jack the Modernist

Reading

Etcetera

Small Press Traffic celebrates the release of Robert Glück’s Jack the Modernist (The New York Review Books, 2025), the classic postmodern novel now back in print. Jack the Modernist traverses various San Francisco worlds — including Glück’s original workshops at Small Press Traffic — offering scintillating reflections on desire, memory, and artistic life. Join us for cava, pastries, and a reading from Robert.

“Jack the Modernist captures its historical moment, measuring the distance between its time and our own as the book arrives again like a capsule. First published by a small press during a period of awakening consciousness and queer experimentation, it was reissued ten years later as the gay community reckoned with catastrophe. And here we are now, as it finds its third life amid yet another emergency, at a time when multiple communities are under siege by a government that is unapologetic for its cruelties.”

—Rob Halpern, from his introduction to the new edition

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Doors at 4:00 PM

Reading and remarks at 4:30 PM

This event is co-sponsored by The New York Review Books. Books will be for sale.

WHEN

Sunday, October 26, 2025

4:00 pm

WHERE

Et al.

2831a Mission St, SF

NOTES ON ACCESsIBILITY

Et al.'s exhibition spaces are on the ground floor; the entrance and bathrooms are wheelchair-accessible.

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Robert Glück

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.