Miranda Mellis and Robert Glück — 'Crocosmia' and 'Jack the Modernist'

Third Place Books welcomes authors Miranda Mellis and Robert Glück to our Seward Park store for a conversation about Miranda's new book Crocosmia, a provocative work of revolutionary eco-fiction, and the new edition of Robert's classic tale of sex, art, and obsession Jack the Modernist.

This event is free and open to the public. For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!

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This event is free to attend. For important updates, registration is highly recommended in advance.

About Crocosmia. . .

A revelatory novel (or parable) of art, adventure, and radical politics, set in a world on the precipice.

A philosophical fable, Crocosmia centers on Maya as she recollects the "great turning"--a moment of radical social and ecological change effected in part by the art of her mother, Jane. As Maya recalls her upbringing--from a commune run by anarchist nuns to a time of rural isolation before her mother's disappearance--Mellis's prose gorgeously conjures a life defined by revolutionary thought and action and the interplay and tension between family life and political commitment. At once a fantasy, a handbook to political thought, and a work of eco-fiction, this lush novel meditates on how, in a world on the precipice, dreams of communal care can bloom.

About 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.

Miranda Mellis is the author of Demystifications (2021); The Instead; The Spokes (2012); None of This Is Real (2012); The Revisionist (2007). She has been an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and Millay Colony. She received the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction, the Michael S. Harper Praxis Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She grew up in San Francisco and now lives in Olympia, Washington.

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.

About Third Place Books

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.